The New Nation - Internet Edition

UNB, Dhaka

Cindy McCain and her daughter Bridget appear at the 2008 Republican National Convention in Minnesota.

Bridget McCain, who was taken to America from a Bangladeshi orphanage by McCain's wife Cindy in 1991, was introduced to delegates in Minneapolis in her first appearance of the presidential campaign, according to a report released by Telegraph.co.UK.

Wes Gullett, a former aide to McCain, told the audience that Mrs McCain had spotted Bridget and another child among 160 abandoned babies at a centre run by the late Mother Teresa in Dhaka. Bridget had suffered a cleft palate so severe that she could not be fed, while the other had a serious heart condition.

Fearing both would die without medical attention, Mrs McCain demanded that she be allowed to take the children back to the US, and applied for visas. She argued furiously with Bangladeshi officials until they were signed. "I don't know where I got the nerve," Mrs McCain said later.

The first McCain knew of Bridget, Gullett told the convention, was when he met his wife at the airport in Arizona. He asked: "Where is she going?" to which she replied: "To our house."

He said: "I remember John's face. That day he was not the tough war hero senator. He was like every other new father, full of love and emotion."

Gullett and his wife Deborah adopted the other baby and called her Nikki.

Miss McCain, 17, was placed at the centre of a political scandal in 2000, when her father ran against George W Bush for the Republican presidential candidacy. After McCain, who had taken his adopted daughter on the campaign trail, won the New Hampshire primary, a Bush campaign phone poll asked voters in South Carolina: "Would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?"

McCain lost the South Carolina primary and his campaign never recovered.

After her daughter's introduction at the convention, Mrs McCain, 54, clasped her daughter's hands and the two could be seen wiping away tears.