Joomla 3.4.3 article intro images not showing

I am using Joomla 3.4.3 and I have an article with the following code..

<p>kj<img src="images/demo_preview/about/about1.png" alt="image" width="150" height="150" /></p>
<hr id="system-readmore" />
<p> This is a sample blog posting.</p>

I have set article options to show Frontend images but I am only being shown the text.

Here is what i see in the article editor...

[![Joomla Article Editor View][1]][1]

and this is what I see on the site...

[![enter image description here][2]][2]

as you can see the text only is displayed


[1]:

[2]:

I have found a workaround for this problem. It appears that Joomla was stripping out img tags in the article intro text.

I found this function in the helper file...

public static function _cleanIntrotext($introtext)
{
$introtext = str_replace('<p>', ' ', $introtext);
$introtext = str_replace('</p>', ' ', $introtext);
$introtext = strip_tags($introtext, '<a><em><strong>');
$introtext = trim($introtext);

return $introtext;
}

By commenting out the strip_tags function I am able to get img tags back into my articles. It seems like a bit of a hack method to me but it works.