(CNN) -- Moammar Gadhafi's Bab al-Aziziya compound is the heart of his nearly 42-year rule, a symbol of his defiance of the West. 

The sprawling complex houses modern government offices, the Bedouin tent in which Gadhafi received visitors and stands of palm trees. A bombed-out building remains as a monument to a 1986 U.S. airstrike that killed one of Gadhafi's daughters, along with a statue of a Libyan fist crushing an American jet. 

And Tuesday evening, after rebel fighters who have battled Gadhafi's forces for six months punched into the compound, it was wreathed in smoke. Rebels posed around the statue and fired hundreds if not thousands of rounds of ammunition into the air in celebration, spurring the occasional rebuke from senior fighters. 

The rebels picked through the compound in search of Libya's longtime strongman, but one fighter told CNN that neither Gadhafi nor any members of his family had been found. Bab al-Aziziya appeared to have been abandoned so quickly that a teakettle remained heating on a stove in one building, he said. 

"They ran away, all of them," he said. "They have gone underground." 

Bab al-Aziziya, located near Tripoli's Mediterranean shore, is believed to be undergirded by a network of tunnels. 

Abubaker Saad, a former Gadhafi aide, told CNN that at least one of the older buildings on the site was built atop a bunker four stories underground. But he said it was unlikely that Gadhafi had been in the complex before it was overrun Tuesday, since it had been targeted by repeated NATO airstrikes during the last few months of fighting. 
What other thing the complex have?
a statue of a Libyan fist crushing an American jet