Biden napped on plane while families waited hours for soldiers' bodies: Report

Several family members of US Marines killed in Afghanistan had to wait for more than three hours as President Joe Biden napped aboard his Air Force One aircraft before a formal event by the US military to receive the bodies of service members in 2021, reports claimed.

The president and First Lady Jill Biden were scheduled to welcome the caskets of the killed soldiers at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware at the 'dignified transfer ceremony'. The 13 US soldiers were killed by Taliban terrorists on August 26, 2021, along with scores of Afghans, at Kabul Airport’s Abbey Gate in multiple suicide bombings.

"(Biden) made us wait an extra three hours to receive the bodies of our dead family members because he couldn't pull it together,' Roice McCollum, a sister of a killed soldier, told the British newspaper DailyMail.

The sister said that grieving families were waiting for the President to appear, and a military officer told her he was napping on his plane.

Darin Hoover, the father of another soldier, Taylor Hoover, also shared the same experience. He said, "We sat in that office for what seemed like an eternity waiting on the doddering old fool".

It was during the same event where Biden controversially checked his watch while the bodies were being prepared.

However, the White House denied the families' claims, stating that such an incident never occurred.

"That claim is untrue. As President Biden said on the 4th anniversary of the tragic attack on Abbey Gate and in the letters he wrote to family members after meeting with them in Dover, ‘these 13 Americans--and the many more that were wounded--were patriots in the highest sense’ and ‘we owe them and their families a sacred debt we will never be able to fully repay, but will never cease working to fulfil," a White House spokesperson told Daily Mail.