playing devil's advocate here (from what i've read, i don't think this is a good idea at all), my limited understanding (i develop software related to seismic detection, but was not educated as a geophysicist) is that we really have no clue about earthquake prediction. so the "best" scientific advice may well have been "we don't know"; perhaps they were guilty of being too confident?
It looks like they gave some politician a detailed, comprehensive explanation that boiled down to "We don't know, but if we really had to give a definite answer we'd guess that a major earthquake is comparatively unlikely, because...". That politician turned around and told the public "Definitely no earthquake, everything is completely safe, go back to work." It's like a game of telephone where everybody in the middle is drunk or stupid and one side is getting sued for what came out the other end.
There's a nice quote from a geophysicist in the other Nature article on this:
Scientists are often asked the wrong question, which is 'when will the next earthquake hit?' The right question is 'how do we make sure it won't kill so many people when it hits?'
