Pictured: Anthony Grainger's Audi with bullet holes

A public inquiry into why police shot dead an unarmed robbery suspect has released a picture of the stolen car in which he was killed - showing a single bullet hole in the windscreen.

Anthony Grainger, 36, from Salford, was blasted in the chest as he sat in the driver’s seat of a red Audi on false plates during an armed swoop by Greater Manchester Police on a village in Cheshire in March 2012.

As a public inquiry into the death comes at an end, the police pictures of a car park in Culcheth taken after the fatal shooting were released.

One focuses on the single bullet hole in the windscreen of Mr Grainger’s Audi.

Another shows how an unmarked police car, also an Audi, parked across the nose of the stolen car.

A police marksman, known only as Q9, fired the fatal shot with a Heckler and Koch MP5 sub-machine gun from the rear off-side passenger window of the silver police Audi.

Other aerial shots show how the two cars were positioned in a corner of the car par park off Jackson Avenue.

The inquiry has heard how ‘wildly inaccurate’ police intelligence had suggested Mr Grainger and others on board the car would be armed.Police suspected they were about to commit a robbery, possibly at a Sainsbury’s nearby.

The pictures were released before barristers representing GMP, Q9 and the Grainger family made closing remarks at the inquiry.

Leslie Thomas QC, representing the Grainger family, issued a scathing attack on the ‘botched’ police operation.

He said:

Intelligence on suspects had not been properly tested and the police marksman had been given a ‘grossly exaggerated assessment of Anthony’s threat’, he said.

He said firearms commanders had been ‘slapdash’ while consideration of which tactics to use that day were ‘fundamentally flawed’.

Mr Thomas continued that no police strike should have taken place that night as it was ‘likely there would be no robbery’.

The police marksmen failed to identify themselves as firearms officers while two tyres on the stolen Audi were blown out and a CS grenade was thrown into the car without good reason, he suggested.

The closing submissions will come an end on Thursday when the inquiry chairman, Judge Teague QC, will adjourn to start writing his report and findings, which are expected to be published later in the year.