Hannington was due to a myth at the time that enemies that would destroy the Kingdom would come from the East. The direction which the Bishop was coming from. Thus the Kabaka had chief Luba of Busoga Chiefdom in the East execute the Bishop. Mwanga did, however, subsequently appoint several Christians to important military positions. Executions in 1885–86 In 1886 Mwanga ordered the executions of a number of his pages for refusing to yield to his sexual demands, which he saw as insubordination. Heike Behrend says they were both Christian and Muslim converts; other sources speak only of Anglican and Catholic victims, and mention the killing of Muslims as having occurred ten years earlier at the hands of Mwanga's father Muteesa. Joseph Mukasa, a convert to Christianity who had deplored the assassination of Hannington, and had tried to protect the court pages, was the first to be executed on 15 November 1885: this was at the instigation of the Katikkiro (prime minister) Mukasa, whose successor Joseph Mukasa was tipped to become king. Then, between 25 May and 3 June 1886, a wider series of executions were carried out. Mwanga instructed the killing of all the young men who disobeyed him – partly to satisfy the demands of the older chiefs. Twenty-two of the men, who had converted to Catholicism, were burned alive at Namugongo in 1886. "The reasons behind the persecution are still heavily debated", Behrend states. Political factors certainly played a part. Those killed included minor chiefs, some of whom, such as Joseph Mukasa, were "the victims of particular grudges by their seniors ... jealous that these up and coming young men would soon be ousting them from power". Ward has argued that the motivation was the perception that "these Christians were rebels against the Kabaka, unwitting tools of foreign imperialism". A witness to the event, the French missionary priest Lourdel, considered that the principal cause was Mwanga's feeling of being despised by the literate Christians who claimed a superior knowledge of religion. Lourdel gave as a secondary cause of Mwanga's action the refusal of the pages to meet traditional royal demands of sexual submission. The king, who by tradition had the power of life and death over his subjects, was angered by this refusal to obey his wishes to have sex with him. Marie de Kiewet-Hemphill concludes that the immediate pretext, if not the whole cause, was therefore