Where was Amit Tiwari all these days?

“My son is innocent... He will justify himself when he comes out of this,” said Colonel Vikram Tiwari, father of Amit, who was picked up by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Friday evening for allegedly hacking several email accounts.

Amit was arrested by a team of CBI officers who had received a tip-off about Amit’s activities from the United States of America’s Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

The cyber world has several blogs with warnings about this Pune-based super hacker. His contemporaries in Pune call it “an ingenious mind gone astray”. Besides, Amit’s love for extravagance is well-known, if sources are to be believed.

An engineering college dropout, his hacking assignments provided him enough to buy flashy cars and dine in five star hotels. “From what I know, people like him charge almost Rs 25,000 for just snooping on an email account for someone else,” said a city based cyber crime expert.

Amit’s family, however, his family maintained that he was innocent.

“Amit is innocent and he will soon come out to make this clear. He has several international clients and to so far he has made over 25 websites,” his father Col Tiwari said, adding, “If you want to know more about him, you can approach CBI.”

Col Tiwari refused to give personal information about Amit. “I would like to urge you to leave me alone and not disturb my privacy and personnel life,” he said. A software expert, who had done a few assignments for Tiwari before dropping out, said that Amit would usually hold meetings at a posh flat in Koregaon Park area about which only a few people knew. “He didn’t make too many friends and preferred to stay in a close circle,” he recalled.

Sources said that Amit lives with his girlfriend and father at Blue Ridge Manor bungalow in the plush Florida Housing Society in Keshavnagar, Mundhwa.

As per the security guards posted at Florida Housing Society, on Friday CBI officials came to Blue Ridge Manor Bungalow to pick him up.

“Since morning CBI officials started coming. Some of them were on bikes. In the afternoon, they picked up Amit from his bungalow,” said one of the security guard. He confirmed that a girl lived with him there and they would use high-end cars. “He owned an international luxury brand car and a hi-end sports utility vehicle,” they said.

According to a hacking expert from the city, who claims to know Tiwari, said the latter led a lavish lifestyle often spending in five star hotels and travelling by business class. Tiwari completed his schooling in Pune, and had dropped out of the engineering course at Bharti Vidyapeeth.