MOSCOW, July 30 (Xinhua) -- Russia's Federal Financial Monitoring Service has added Telegram co-founder Pavel Durov to its list of terrorists and extremists, the TASS news agency reported Thursday.
Durov, listed by a notice published on the monitoring service's official website, was born on Oct. 10, 1984, in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg).
As part of an ongoing criminal investigation, Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) has accused Durov of facilitating terrorist activities and initiated procedures to place him on an international wanted list.
The FSB said that Telegram's operators failed to remove channels, chats and bots actively used by Ukraine's special services to plan acts of sabotage and terrorism on Russian territory, commit mass killings and engage in cyber-fraud.
According to the FSB, more than 153,000 crimes involving Telegram have been registered in Russia since 2022.
Russian telecom watchdog Roskomnadzor had previously sent more than 150,000 requests to Telegram demanding the removal of content deemed illegal, but the requests were ignored, said the TASS report. ■
