Encouraged by this, thousands charged towards the outer cordon of police protecting the mosque.
Very quickly, this cordon collapsed and I saw young men clambering along the branches of trees, dropping over the final barricade, and rushing towards the mosque.
Crowd carried away
The last police retreated from the mosque, their riot shields lifted to avoid being hit by stones the crowd was throwing at them, and two young men scrambled on top of the mosque's central dome and started hacking away at the mortar.
They were soon joined by others.
As telephone lines had been cut, I drove to Faizabad to file my story for the BBC and then tried to return to the site.
Before I could reach there, I and the Hindi-language journalists with me were threatened and then locked in a room by kar sevaks (Hindu volunteers).
We were kept there for several hours before we were rescued by a local official assisted by the head priest of one of Ayodhya's best known temples.
But by then the Babri Masjid had been totally demolished.
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