The adopted daughter of Muammar Gadafy, whom he claimed died as an infant in the 1986 US bombing of his Tripoli compound, appears to be alive and worked as a doctor in the Libyan capital, documents discovered by The Irish Times indicate.

A room belonging to Hana Muammar Gadafy in the section of the Bab al-Azizia compound where the Gadafy family lived contained several documents that appear to indicate she grew up to study medicine in Tripoli and took English classes at the British Council in the Libyan capital.

Many Libyans have long doubted the story of Hana’s death, which Gadafy used to bolster the notion that he was a victim of western military aggression.

Among the items discovered by The Irish Times yesterday are an examination paper from a Libyan university medical faculty signed “Hana Muammar Gadafy” in Arabic, and photographs of Hana including one showing her with Gadafy’s blood daughter Aisha. A British Council certificate, dated July 19th, 2007, showed that Hana Muammar Gadafy had achieved an overall A grade in an English language course there.

In February, a German newspaper obtained a copy of a document related to the freezing of Muammar Gadafy’s assets in Switzerland after Libya’s uprising began. The document listed 23 members of the Gadafy clan, including Hana, whose date of birth is given as November 11th, 1985, making her six months old at the time of the US air strike.

The Libyan rebels have managed to hold the Bab al-Azizia complex, which they first stormed earlier this week, despite intermittent bombardment and sniper fire from forces loyal to Gadafy.

Yesterday rebel fighters and curious onlookers swarmed the complex. At the residential building bombed by the US in 1986, and preserved since in that state by Gadafy, the rebels’ green, red and black flag flew next to the Qatari flag. In front, a sculpture of a golden fist crushing an American fighter jet, commissioned years ago by Gadafy, was spray-painted with the rebels’ colours. In recent months, Gadafy had used the balcony of the building to make defiant speeches against the Nato-led intervention.

Picking his way through the ramshackle building, where Gadafy had displayed the twisted metal fragments of the 1986 missiles to acolytes, Dr Jalal Suweib marvelled at the fact he could look around a place long forbidden to all but guests of the regime. “Like everything at the moment, it seems like a dream,” said the young medic, who spent the last six months treating the injured on the frontline in his hometown of Misrata. “We are tasting freedom after years in darkness.”