Eman al-Obeidy, the Libyan woman who had accused Muammar Gaddafi troops of gang-raping her after arresting her, arrived in Malta yesterday aboard a UN flight from Benghazi.

The news was broken by CNN, which quoted a high-level US State Department source. A Libyan refugee who was on the same flight with her confirmed to The Times that Ms al-Obeidy arrived in Malta with her lawyer and a relative last night.

Sources said she is today expected to fly to an Austrian processing centre in Europe before leaving for the US.

Ms al-Obeidy grabbed the world’s attention this spring when she burst into the restaurant of the Rixos Hotel in Tripoli, where the international press corps was staying, to tell journalists that Libyan troops had beaten and gang-raped her.

Government security forces dragged her out of the hotel in front of the rolling cameras of several news networks and attacked journalists who tried to help her.

A regime spokesman claimed she was drunk and mentally unstable. She was eventually released after some days, after which she fled Libya. She was initially offered protection in Qatar, however, she was controversially forcibly deported back to Libya last Thursday.

She told CNN in the hours leading to her deportation, armed guards were posted outside her hotel room, preventing a representative from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees from helping her.

Ms Al Obeidy said a group of men and women beat her, her father and her sister in a parking lot, and they were beaten again at the airport. Amnesty International called the deportation “outrageous”, saying the action by the Qatari government “is a serious breach by Qatar of its international obligations”.