The Delhi High Court has asked a federal land agency to explain its demolition of a centuries-old mosque that was razed in the Indian capital this week.

The Delhi Development Authority demolished the Akhunji Masjid in an operation carried out by bulldozers on the night of January 30.

An Islamic seminary and a cemetery attached to the mosque were also destroyed as police and paramilitary forces provided protection and erected steel barricades to keep people away.1

The age of the mosque is not certain but it is known to have undergone repairs in 1217, according to the Delhi-based oral historian and heritage conservationist Sohail Hashmi. It is mentioned in a list of historical monuments published in 1920 by the Archaeological Survey of India.

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• 1. The mosque was thought to be as old as the nearby 13th-century Qutub Minar, a Unesco world heritage site in Delhi's Mehrauli area. The DDA, which reports to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, is responsible for developing commercial land in the capital. It claimed the Akhunji Masjid was an “illegal structure” and encroaching on a forest reserve, a claim rejected by the mosque management.