Last month, Pavel Durov’s arrest at Le Bourget airport in Paris ignited a flurry of speculation about the judicial and political dynamics underlying the apprehension. Was the American national security apparatus reigning in a wayward asset? Was Macron serving up a cold dish of revenge for Telegram’s role in torpedoing recent French elections? Were the Russians involved? And did the UAE freeze a billion-dollar deal to buy French fighter jets to pressure France to release him?

Most of these questions seem fancifully tinged with the kind of sensational claims designed to generate likes on X. But putting aside the arrest itself, there are a slew of other unanswered questions about Telegram — which, well on track to join the billion-user club, has 950 million users — including the nature of its security and encryption, the app’s freedom-fighting origin story, the company’s relationship with the Russian government, and, of course, the nature of the charges against Durov. These layers of context themselves tell a story about Telegram, its rocketing rise as a global platform, and the legal perdition Durov faces.

On Saturday, August 24, around 8pm local time, Durov was arrested at Paris-Le Bourget, a general and business aviation airport. Twenty minutes before landing, at 7:10 local time, Durov’s Embraer Legacy 600 veered off course, turning sharply south before returning to its previous southwest course five minutes later. The temporary reroute led to speculation that Durov was tipped off about the impending arrest and ordered his pilot to exit French airspace, but, the theory goes, the plane didn’t have sufficient fuel.