Start tag expected, '<' not found in sitemap.xml — Not sure what's wrong

A

admin

Administrator
Staff member
This is what my website's sitemap.xml looks like:

Code: 
&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
&lt;urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"&gt;

  &lt;url&gt;
    &lt;loc&gt;http://example.com/&lt;/loc&gt;
    &lt;lastmod&gt;2013-04-02T12:45:31+00:00&lt;/lastmod&gt;
    &lt;changefreq&gt;daily&lt;/changefreq&gt;
    &lt;priority&gt;1&lt;/priority&gt;
  &lt;/url&gt;

  &lt;url&gt;
    &lt;loc&gt;http://example.com/2013/wordpress-customize-login-page/&lt;/loc&gt;
    &lt;lastmod&gt;2013-03-01T12:06:00+00:00&lt;/lastmod&gt;
    &lt;changefreq&gt;weekly&lt;/changefreq&gt;
    &lt;priority&gt;0.8&lt;/priority&gt;
  &lt;/url&gt;

&lt;/urlset&gt;

And here's <a href="http://aahank.com/sitemap.xml" rel="nofollow">the original sitemap</a>. First, I made sure of <a href="http://validator.w3.org/" rel="nofollow">valid XML markup</a>, then checked my sitemap on <a href="http://www.xmlcheck.com/index.php" rel="nofollow">xmlcheck</a> and <a href="http://sitemapxml.net/sitemap-validator.php" rel="nofollow">sitemapxml</a>.

The two sitemap validators gave this error:

Code: 
Fatal Error 4: Start tag expected, '&lt;' not found in http://example.com/sitemap.xml on line 1 column 1

As I see it, nothing's missing. Not sure what I am doing wrong. (Googling didn't help either.)
 
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