By STEPHEN BEVAN, Mail on Sunday

Last updated at 22:03 28 October 2006

The father of Madonna's adopted orphan has dismissed as a lie the singer's claim on TV that his wife and other children died of AIDS.

Yohane Banda, 32, whose wife died aged 25 after giving birth to 13-month-old David, says he will now have to live with the stigma.

The African peasant farmer also denied the superstar's allegation that he had never visited his son at the orphanage, to which he was entrusted at the age of two weeks.

Speaking on the Oprah Winfrey Show last week, Madonna, 48, said when she met David at the orphanage in Malawi she was told his mother and three siblings had died of AIDS, while his father's whereabouts were unknown.

But Mr Banda, who lives in the village of Lipunga, close to the border with Zambia, said: "She never went for an HIV test and she died in Zambia at her parents' house, so how could anyone know if that is what she died of?"

The clinic she attended when she became ill during pregnancy had diagnosed anaemia, he added.

Later, when she was admitted to hospital in Malawi, he was told she had a physical condition that made childbirth very risky.

Mr Banda insisted he had two other children - not three as Madonna was told - one of whom had died of malaria, while the other died suddenly at 18 months from an unknown cause. Neither was HIV positive as far as he knew.

Mr Banda said he was worried that if people believed Madonna's claims, they would stigmatise him.

In the TV interview, Madonna said David had been abandoned by his family. "No one from his extended family had visited him since he arrived," she told Oprah. But Mr Banda insisted this was also "a lie", adding: "I visited David many times, too many to count."

The baby was also visited by his grandmother, while Mr Banda's brother, Profera, "saw him almost every day, sometimes twice a day".

Despite his anger at the slurs, Mr Banda refused to blame Madonna and instead accused the orphanage of giving her "false information".

However, an official at the Home of Hope Orphan Care Centre insisted: "We gave her no such information," and instead pointed the finger at Malawi's Ministry of Gender and Child Welfare.

Meanwhile, although David has been in the UK for less than two weeks, Madonna has introduced him to her Kabbalah faith.

The move is likely to upset Mr Banda, who was told his son was going to "a very nice Christian lady". Madonna took the toddler to the Friday night Shabat ceremony at the Central London Kabbalah Centre, and invited other children to "come and play with baby David".

The boy even wore the Kabbalah red string bracelet, believed by followers to ward off evil spirits.