Gadhafi's Mysterious Daughter Hana: Did She Ever Exist?

Moammar Gadhafi's adopted daughter Hana Gadhafi has been one of the great mysteries of the former-Libyan leader's regime.

Gadhafi told the world that his four-year-old girl died during the Regan-era bombing raids on Libya in 1986. After the air-strikes, he showed the body of a young girl to an American journalist and even built a shrine to his lost daughter inside his Tripoli compound.

Yet, Gadhafi had never mentioned Hana publicly before the bombing, leading many to insinuate that either her death, or her existence, was a fabrication made up to incite a new hatred for the West.

The story of her death lasted as long as the Gadhafi remained in power, and he organized the Hana Festival of Freedom and Peace on the 20th anniversary of her passing.

But, various clues throughout the years leading up to the revolution shed some, albeit dim, light on the matter

In 1999, the Xinhua news agency in China printed a picture of Gadhafi during a visit to South Africa. The photo showed Gadhafi, his wife and two girls having lunch with Nelson Mandela. The caption read Gadhafi's wife, Safia Farkash al-Barassi, and Gaddafi's daughters Aisha and Hana. The only person who couldn't be identified in the picture was the girl next to Aisha.

Eleven years later, around the time the Libyan revolution was beginning in February 2011, the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag published a document from a Swiss bank that listed 23 members of Gadhafi's family, Hana included.

Even stranger, the document had the girl's birth down as Nov. 11, 1985, meaning she would have been six months old during the U.S. bombing campaign, not four.

That fact, combined with dental records at the Libyan Embassy in London, England, has led some to believe that there have been two different Hana Gadhafis. The Daily Telegraph reported in August that an English dentist was flown to Tripoli to do a procedure on a patient named Hana Ghadafi.

It's possible perhaps there could be a second Hana Gadhafi, the dentist told British authorities. It's not beyond the realms of possibility.

Now, after rebel fighters ransacked the Bab al-Aziziya compound and dug through old documents, new facts concerning Hana have arisen, casting more shadow than light on the young woman.

Confirming some rumors, rebels discovered school documents and a passport for a Hana Gadhafi who was a doctor at a Tripoli hospital. Yet, the National Transitional Council has warped the truth in the past, once claiming to have killed Gadhafi's son Khamis and once claiming to have captured Saif al-Islam Gadhafi. Both turned out to be false (although Khamis is again presumed to be dead).

Now that rebels have seized the hospital, medical colleagues are saying the Hana Gadhafi had been a surgeon at the facility for two years.

In the period before the uprising, Hana was doing a good job and she didn't bother anyone. But when the revolution started she showed the ugly face of the Gaddafi family. She started telling colleagues not to treat patients who were anti-Gaddafi, whom she called 'rats', doctor Noureddine Hassan Aribi told Al Jazeera.

The question remains -- which Hana is this one? And why did Gadhafi claim a daughter died and then keep one in hiding? As this saga unfolds, it only gets more enigmatic. Perhaps the rebels can ask Gadhafi once and for all; if they find him.