TRIPOLI, Libya – The mother of the woman who burst into a Tripoli hotel and claimed she had been raped by militiamen loyal to Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi hailed her daughter as a hero Sunday and said she had been offered money and a house by the government if she changed her story.

Aisha Ahmed, contacted by telephone at her home in Tobruk, in the rebel-held eastern part of the country, said she was proud of the courage displayed by her daughter, Iman al-Obeidi, whose dramatic outburst Saturday was broadcast around the world.

“I am very happy, very proud,” Ahmed said, describing her daughter as a 26-year-old law student in Tripoli.

A government official in Tripoli who said he had spoken with al-Obeidi called her a prostitute and said the rape took place when a party went wrong.

Al-Obeidi catapulted to world fame Saturday when she burst into the breakfast buffet at Tripoli’s Rixos Hotel, where the foreign press corps is staying as guests of Gadhafi’s regime.

Disheveled, weeping, bleeding and bruised, she told reporters she had been raped by 15 Gadhafi militiamen after being detained at a checkpoint because she comes from the eastern city of Benghazi, the epicenter of the revolt against the Gadhafi regime. Before she could finish her story, security guards, government minders and wait staff violently overpowered her and hauled her away in an unmarked car.

Hasan Modeer, a rebel activist who was with al-Obeidi’s mother in Tobruk, said a government official had called Ahmed at 3 a.m. Sunday, asking her to convince her daughter to change her story.

“They said they will give her a new house and a lot of money and anything she wanted,” Modeer said, adding that Ahmed had relayed the message to her daughter by phone but that al-Obeidi had refused.

“She said, ‘I will die rather than change my words,’ ” Modeer said.

But government spokesman Moussa Ibrahim said that he had talked to al-Obeidi by telephone and that it turned out she knew her assailants. He described her as a divorced mother who earned an income “having parties with men” and said the rape occurred after the men she was with tried to force her to drink whiskey and beat her up.

One of them was the son of a high-ranking government official, Ibrahim said, but otherwise there were no political implications to what he called a “criminal” case.