The importance of an allegation

In recent times, eagle-eyed readers of the Times of India would have observed a curious typographical phenomenon in that newspaper. In stories such as this one about a crime in Pune, the word allegedly is italicised. Thus, in print, the article looks like this:

"The Haveli police on Saturday arrested Shekhar Shettiyar (28) of Kurla and booked five others for allegedly murdering Nathibai Chaudhary..."

"On June 26, 2001, the gang allegedly entered the shop posing as customers and stole the jewellery by threatening employees."

The motivation behind this oddity is unclear, and in the absence of the ToI style manual (if there is such a thing) in the public domain, it is hard to guess why this would be so. What is so special about the word "allegedly" that it needs to be highlighted thus?

Making it curious-er is the fact that there are many occurrences of the word in other ToI articles where it does not get such a treatment. Strange! (but not unusual for a paper whose curious 'case' of the perpendicular pronoun was remarked upon by this blog here.)

Notes
Incidentally, the ToI epaper doesn't provide the Pune edition any more, so I can't check if this formatting shows up in that version. It doesn't in the plain vanilla web version linked above.
Another blogger has made the very same puzzling observation.