What's a European accent then?

Yesterday's thelondonpaper included a story headlined "An army of squatters moves into MoD flats". This par particularly struck me:

The squatters, who are mostly aged from their early 20s to mid 30s, milled about the site today, several of them speaking with European accents.

What on earth is a European accent? Birmingham is part of Europe, so perhaps all the squatters came from Birmingham.

But according to The Guardian's version:

Marcin, a 28-year-old from Poland, said: "There are people here from all over the world, Italians, Spaniards, South Africans, Portuguese."

There you go – detail. Much better.