entertainment: The voices

I recently watched The Prince of Persia: Sands of Time: The Movie. The film isn't very good which is what I expected, but can someone explain to me why all the Persians had British accents. I can understand that the core actors were British, but why did Jake Gyllenhaal that well known AMERICAN have to put on an English accent. To be fair it wasn't a bad accent, I just have no clue why they felt it was necessary.

I can only presume that Disney felt the audience would confuse the film for an episode of 24 and start hoping Jack Bauer would turn up and kick some Terrorist arse.