The Reuters “Good, Bad, and Ugly” blog has addressed the cropped photos; they say they were notified by readers, and print several rather blunt emails they received. (Of course, they also became aware of it from LGF almost as soon as I posted about it; my Reuters tracker has recorded more than 100 visits from their Canary Wharf offices since yesterday morning.)

They claim the cropping was inadvertent, failing the smell test: Cropped photos | Analysis & Opinion.

This is all they have to say about it:

The images in question were made available in Istanbul, and following normal editorial practice were prepared for dissemination which included cropping at the edges. When we realized that a dagger was inadvertently cropped from the images, Reuters immediately moved the original set, as well.