Peter left the country with the Royal Yugoslav Government's ministers following the Axis invasion. Initially the Yugoslav king and his government ministers went to Greece where they refuelled at a British airfield in rural Greece where locals did not at first believe that he was king of Yugoslavia. They then went to British-ruled Jerusalem in Mandatory Palestine, and Cairo in Egypt. In Athens on 16 April 1941, Peter issued a press statement saying he would fight until victory before fleeing Greece. In Jerusalem on 4 May 1941, Peter affirmed in a press statement the Cvetković–Maček agreement of 23 August 1939, which turned Yugoslavia into a semi-federation as the basis of the post-war political system he was planning to introduce once his nation was liberated. Of the 22 men Peter had sworn in as ministers on 27 March 1941, two were killed during the German invasion and another five chose not to go into exile. Džafer Kulenović of the Yugoslav Muslim Organization switched sides and went over to the "Ustashe", urging Bosnian Muslims to join the Croats in killing Serbs; Father Franc Kulovec of the Slovene People's Party was killed during the bombing of Belgrade; and Vladko Maček of the Croatian Peasant Party decided not to go into exile. As a result, the Yugoslav government-in-exile was dominated by Serb ministers. The constitutional basis of the government-in-exile was always murky as the government had come into power as a result of a coup d'état yet it professed to be based on the 1931 constitution which made the king the chief executive officer of the state with ministers only responsible to the Crown. The politicians took the view that the 1941 coup d'état had been a popular revolution which had restored democracy, but as long as the 1931 constitution was technically still in effect, King Peter had very broad executive powers.