New York ? Tiger lover Antoine Yates is brokenhearted at losing the big cat he called his “only friend” — even as prosecutors said Tuesday he also may have kept a lion in his Harlem apartment.

“I want my cat back,” Yates declared outside Manhattan Criminal Court. “I love you, Ming!”

Yates, who was freed after a brief court appearance, said he hoped to be reunited soon with the Bengal-Siberian tiger that mauled him last week.

“He was like my brother; he was my best friend, my only friend, really,” said Yates, 31. “I am brokenhearted. I hope my kitty cat is safe.”

The tiger was subdued in a commando-style police raid Saturday and is now in solitary confinement in an Ohio animal shelter. Yates was returned Monday to New York after fleeing to Philadelphia.

Prosecutors called Yates “extremely reckless,” and said Ming and Al the alligator may have not been the only members of the menagerie in the five-bedroom flat at the Drew Hamilton Houses.

“(We) are looking into other animals, as well as a lion,” said Assistant Dist. Atty. Jeremy Saland.

But a defense lawyer portrayed Yates as an overzealous animal lover. And he scoffed at suggestions that Yates kept a lion in the fifth-floor apartment, where Ming had his own bedroom and a custom-built sandpit.

“Pretty soon, they’re going to be saying he had all sorts of animals,” said attorney Raymond Colon, who was put on the case by Johnnie Cochran after Yates’ family called the former O.J. Simpson lawyer for help.

Criminal Court Judge Judy Jackson turned down the prosecution request to hold Yates on $15,000 bail, and released him on his own recognizance.

Outside court, Yates said he was bitten last week when he jumped between Ming and a kitten he found on his doorstep last week and named Shadow.

Yates said he was playing a favorite game with Ming when the big cat went bonkers. “We was playing ‘Hey, buddy, buddy.’ He liked that. Shadow heard me and walked back to find me and everything exploded.”

After Ming latched on to him, Yates said, “I embraced him and pulled him down (onto) me. I realize you have to take control of the situation. I coached him into dropping me. I said, ‘Ming, No.’ When Ming hears ‘no,’ he knows ‘no.”‘

After he was bitten, Yates said Ming “licked his head and tried to clean me.”

He said he and the tiger were more than just master and pet. “I never feared him,” Yates said of Ming.

“My arm and my leg are stiff, but the part that hurts me the most is my heart. I’m not mad at him, I love him.