Telegram CEO Pavel Durov claims he survived poisoning attempt in 2018

Telegram founder Pavel Durov has described his experience surviving a poisoning attempt in the spring of 2018 to American podcaster Lex Fridman in an interview that was released on Tuesday.

Durov recounted how a “weird neighbour” had left something for him, and how, an hour after going to bed that night, he felt pain all over his body. “I tried to get up and go to the bathroom … I felt … my body started to switch off. First the eyesight and hearing, then I had difficulty breathing … very acute pain. … And then I collapsed on the floor.”

“I found myself on the floor the next day,” Durov said, “I was super weak. I looked at my arms and my body, blood vessels were broken all over my body.”

Though Durov didn’t say where the alleged poisoning had happened, he did tell Fridman that they “had a couple of countries trying to ban Telegram” at the time, one of which was Russia. He said he had decided not to tell most of his team about the incident as he “didn’t want them to worry”.

In 2017, Durov turned down a demand by Russia’s Federal Security Service that he provide Telegram encryption keys allowing the FSB to decrypt messages sent on the app by the organisers of a terrorist attack in the St. Petersburg metro.

In 2018, Russia’s media watchdog Roskomnadzor blocked the messenger, leading to mass protests in Moscow and elsewhere. The ban, which had proven ineffectual, was ultimately lifted in 2020 after Telegram agreed to cooperate with the Russian authorities on terrorism investigations.

The symptoms described by Durov were similar to those described by the late Alexey Navalny after he was poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok in the Siberian city of Tomsk in 2020, Telegram channel ASTRA said on Wednesday.

Durov currently faces legal charges in France over Telegram’s alleged failure to crackdown on illicit financial transactions, the distribution of child pornography, drug trafficking, money laundering and organised crime, among others.