SEATTLE » Seattle police have released new photos of the shotgun investigators say Kurt Cobain used to kill himself.

The release reportedly is in response to a public-records request from the news media for evidence to dispel conspiracies surrounding the rock legend’s death.

The five images, posted on the Police Department’s blotter and taken last June, show cold-case Detective Michael Ciesynski holding the firearm that first responders found across the 27-year-old Nirvana frontman’s body in his Seattle garage on April 8, 1994.

Seattle police made the evidence public after CBS News said it requested the images to help quell a conspiracy theory that the gun “had been melted down in a supposed SPD cover-up of a potential murder.”

Previously released photos and records from the high-profile death investigation do not show the gun in full view, CBS News reports. The case has been the subject of countless conspiracy theories over the years, including that Cobain was actually killed through a secret plot involving government officials.

According to the King County Medical Examiner’s Office, Cobain died of a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head, and toxicology reports showed he had a lethal dose of heroin in his body at the time of his death.

The Police Department last widely released evidence from the closed case in 2014, showing photos from four previously undeveloped rolls of 35mm film.

Ciesynski said at the time investigators had not earlier developed the film because the medical investigators had taken their own set of photographs, and police also had a series of Polaroid pictures that showed the same types of shots from slightly different angles.

Certain graphic images of the crime scene, such as Cobain’s shotgun wound, have never been released for the sake of privacy.

In 2014, longtime Seattle conspiracy theorist Richard Lee filed a lawsuit against the city, alleging it wrongfully withheld photos and reports that would have proved Cobain was murdered. A King County Superior Court judge dismissed the lawsuit last July.

Seattle police said they added the five new shotgun photos to the city’s computer system earlier this month and since have added them to the case’s investigative file.