The quotes came from people who only knew him as a WannaCry researcher, due the fact that the DoJ took forever to say why they were arresting him. It's as if a prominent anti-spammer were to get arrested with no explanation. A naive guess would be that it was due to their anti-spam work. Even though this arrest wasn't related to his WannaCry, that was his most recent exposure to the public and I think assuming it was related to that can be forgiven