Japan PM hopeful Ishiba sees 'room' for corporate tax hike, Kyodo reports
Germany's far-right AfD on track for another state election win
Southwest Airlines warns staff of 'tough decisions' ahead, Bloomberg reports
Israel raids and shuts down Al Jazeera's bureau in Ramallah in the West Bank
GM to lay off about 1,700 workers at Kansas plant
Kyle Larson wins at Bristol as 2 former NASCAR champions eliminated from playoffs
North Carolina coach Mack Brown says 'embarrasing' 70-50 loss to James Madison is his fault
Cleveland Guardians clinch AL Central title when Royals lose to Giants
(Reuters) -The founder of the Telegram messaging app, Pavel Durov, under investigation in France, said early on Friday that French authorities should have approached his company with their complaints rather than detaining him.
Durov, writing on his Telegram channel in his first public comments since his detention last month, denied any suggestion the app was an "anarchic paradise".
He said the investigation into the app was surprising in that French authorities had access to a "hot line" he had helped set up and they could have contacted Telegram's EU representative at any time.
"If a country is unhappy with an Internet service, the established practice is to start a legal action against the service itself," he wrote.
"Using laws from the pre-smartphone era to charge a CEO with crimes committed by third parties on the platform he manages is a misguided approach."
Telegram, he said, was not perfect, but he denied any abuse associated with the app.
"But the claims in some media that Telegram is some sort of anarchic paradise are absolutely untrue," he wrote. "We take down millions of harmful posts and channels every day."
Durov, born in Russia but now a French national, was detained late last month in France amid an investigation into crimes related to child pornography, drug trafficking and fraudulent transactions associated with the app.
(Reporting by Ron Popeski and Dominique PattonEditing by Chris Reese and Lisa Shumaker)
