(Updates with fresh quotes and details)

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor

WASHINGTON, June 1 (Reuters) - A tuberculosis patient who turned fugitive to continue with wedding and honeymoon plans despite warnings not to travel has apologized to the fellow airline passengers he may have endangered, he said in an interview aired on Friday.

"I'm very sorry for any grief or pain that I have caused anyone," Andrew Speaker, a 31-year-old Atlanta lawyer, said on ABC's "Good Morning America."

"I just hope they can forgive me and understand that I really believed that I wasn't putting people at risk."

Speaker says he has tape recordings to prove his assertions that he was only advised not to travel, not clearly forbidden to do so.

"At every turn it was conveyed to me that my family, my wife, my daughter, that no one was at risk and that I was not contagious," he said in an emotional taped interview.

Speaker touched off an international health alert, a rare federal isolation order and a congressional investigation into U.S. border secrity when he and his new bride fled across Europe, sneaked onto a flight to Canada and then drove across the border to the United States to avoid health officials.

Speaker is now being held in near-isolation at a specialist hospital in Denver for treatment for his infection, known as extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis or XDR TB.

ABC interviewer Diane Sawyer spoke to Speaker and his wife, Sarah, at the Denver hospital. At one point, both Sawyer and Speaker wore hospital masks to prevent the possible spread of infection.

He accused the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of abandoning him by asking him to check into a health facility in Rome instead of returning to the United States via commercial airliner for treatment. Speaker and his wife said the government refused to help arrange alternate transportation home.

"Why are you abandoning me like this and asking me to turn myself over for an indefinite time?" Speaker said. "It's very real that I could have died there ... I felt very abandoned."

Health experts are tracking down 100 or so people who spent eight hours or longer close to Speaker on two trans-Atlantic flights to encourage them to be tested for possible TB exposure.

CDC officials say a federal isolation order -- the first issued in 44 years -- will likely be transferred to local Colorado authorities.

NOT ESPECIALLY INFECTIOUS

CDC officials and an infectious disease expert at National Jewish Medical Center, where Speaker is being treated, said he was not especially infectious. The Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacilli were difficult to find in his sputum, he is not coughing and he appears to be in good health.

In an ironic twist, a veteran TB researcher at the CDC, Robert Cooksey, confirmed that he is Speaker's new father-in-law. Cooksey denied being the source of the TB that infected Speaker and Speaker's doctor said it is not known where the personal injury lawyer, an avid traveler, became infected.

Speaker's wife, Sarah, tearfully described how the couple returned home through Canada knowing their names were on U.S. no-fly lists.

"(We were) very scared. We showed our passports at every point that we were asked. They saw our passports. We didn't lie. We booked our tickets under our names," she said.

Homeland Security Department spokesman Russ Knocke said it is also not clear how Speaker evaded U.S. border controls. The CDC had notified Homeland Security about Speaker and asked that he be detained if he turned up.

Knocke said all officers at all ports of entry into the United States had Speaker's name. "The information was in our system, so that the second a passport would have been swiped it would have popped (up)," Knocke said in a telephone interview.

Members of Congress said they would investigate how border agents and the U.S. CDC handled the case.

(Additional reporting by JoAnne Allen and David Morgan)

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