While I do agree that the author(s) of an open source project do not owe me or you anything, I'll have to disagree with you about what is an open source project. Once you've opened up your project it belongs to the community (and even if I'm not a lawyer I think that most of the OSS licenses speak in this direction).
Anyways, I'm pretty sure we will hear soon about what happened and it will be easier to understand things.
_why isn't required to maintain his copy of the source forever. Other people have forked/mirrored his projects; deletion of his repos is an inconvenience, but something that can be recovered from.
./alex