This is nonsense. First of all, while the Brügger & Thomet Station SIX-9 is a design based on the WWII era Welrod (which was used by British Special Operations Executive and US Office of Special Services operatives, as well as being provided to resistance groups) they are not the same gun. Second, the statement that “[t]he gun doesn’t have a silencer but does have a long barrel that enables the 9 mm to fire a nearly silent shot“ is completely wrong; the Welrod and B&T Station SIX-9 have integrally suppressed barrels (that is, the suppressor is built into the barrel), which are about just about an inch or two longer than a full-sized duty weapon like a 1911 or a Beretta 92F. Third, the Welrod and B&T Station SIX-9 have a manual bolt action which requires the user to grab the knurled knob on the back of the pistol, rotate it and pull it back to eject the spent casing, and then push it forward and rotate back to load the next cartridge into the chamber and lock the bolt for firing. Here is a short video of someone operating the Welrod MkII.. Here is a longer video of someone comparing the Welrod to the B&T VP9, which is a more sophisticated version of the Station SIX-9.
It is quite apparent that the weapon wielded by this assassin (warning, this link is to a video that shows just the first shot but stops before a reaction by Thompson) was a conventional autoloading striker-fired pistol (I would guess a Glock or a Springfield XD but the footage is too blurry to make out specific details) with a non-integral suppressor. Full surveillance video of the shooting shows the shooter performing a standard “tap/rack/bang” drill in response to the failure to cycle, which indicates that he is a reasonably well trained shooter but not the characteristic action of rotating the bolt. This news article gets nearly everything about the pistol so completely wrong that they couldn’t fuck it up more if they’d tried, although I will award them a single point for the correct use of the term ‘magazine’ instead of ‘clip’. I have handled (but not fired) the B&T VP9 including cycling the action and the motion is quite distinct from racking the slide on a standard autoloading pistol.
And although the shooter does know how to fire the gun this clearly isn’t a trained professional (notwithstanding that ‘professional assassin for hire’ is largely a made up Hollywood trope) and is likely someone with a little bit of firearm experience whose ‘assassin training’ is strictly from what they have seen on movies and tv. It is clear that the suppressor is probably some homemade piece of junk not properly engineered to allow the gun to cycle normally, the shooter picked a location that is not only well-lit and where there are people around but is also in plain view of a surveillance camera, and frankly selected a weapon far larger and more powerful than needed for an unsuspecting rear shot, then failed to develop a good E&E plan, notwithstanding leaving evidence behind (unless that was some clever ploy to misdirect an investigation, but I highly doubt this guy was that clever). This is almost certainly a disgruntled employee or someone harmed by UHC’s venal policies, not some kind of professional ‘hit’ by a trained assassin, again insofar as such a fictitious creature is even available for hire outside of the service of clandestine agencies.
Stranger