Most probably he did something stupid. He might have changed his password and forgetting this, might have tried to log-in with the old password. The BTC-E support might have pointed out this mistake.
There is absolutely no information about BTC-e, no address, no phone number not even team names, nothing, the only way to contact them is through submitting an email, that's all.
Now I would understand that if the business was only advertising business or some news website that just started then they might have only email support cause they can't afford spending money on other support services.
But BTC-e makes a decent amount of money from commissions of BTC trades, they are handling people's millions of dollars, they should have established a reliable business by now.
My thought is: BTC-e is taking a precaution, that if something wrong happened with BTC-e (like what happened with MT GOX) then they can just disappear with what left of people money and there will be no trace for them! Or may be they already have a plan in mind that at some point they will just rob people's money!
Point is: something isn't right about BTC-e, and that's why I never used them.
I would be willing to join an exchange business that would even ask how many hairs are on my head even if they have low volume exchange rather than joining an unreliable business like BTC-e.