The Sambhal administration has razed the stairs built in front of the under-construction house of Samajwadi MP Zia-ur-Rahman Barq, an accused in the Shahi Jama Masjid violence, at Deepa Sarai in the city.

Over a dozen administrative and police officers reached there with a bulldozer on Friday afternoon and demolished the stairs.

Mani Bhushan Tiwari, executive engineer of the Sambhal Nagar Palika, said: "We had served notices to several house owners and warned them against building their houses on government land. We demolished all those structures after measuring the encroached areas after the expiry of the notice period. This action was not against any particular individual."

Earlier in the day, the electricity department served a notice on Barq, asking him to pay ₹1.91 crore as fine for "tampering with the meters" and "illegally drawing power" in his house in the city. This house is just a stone’s throw from his under-construction building.

Vinod Kumar Gupta, executive engineer of the electricity department, said: "Two meters fixed in Barq's house were found tampered with when a team went there on Thursday to replace them with smart meters."

The department had filed an FIR against Barq and his father Mamlook-ur-Rahman on Thursday for alleged power theft and threatening engineers of the Uttar Pradesh Power Corporation Limited who had gone there to conduct an inquiry and replace the old meters with new smart meters.

V.K. Gangal, a junior engineer, had stated in his police complaint that while the MP had taken a 2KV connection, he was drawing over 16KV power through illegal means.

Barq said: "I raised the issue of the murder of four persons in Sambhal by the police on November 24 and the government is trying to intimidate me."

Four persons had died of bullet injuries during a clash with the police when a survey commission had visited the Shahi Jama Masjid in Sambhal. A local court had directed the survey in response to a petition that the mosque had been built by demolishing a temple during Mughal emperor Babur's reign.