The Polish Prime Minister has cancelled a scheduled trip to Ireland after the helicopter in which he was travelling was involved in an accident last night.
Mr Leszek Miller and 11 other people were injured last night when his government helicopter made an emergency landing in a forest near Warsaw.
Doctors said Mr Miller had a spinal injury and would stay in hospital for several days. But his spokesman said the prime minister would try to attend a key European Union summit in Brussels on December 12-13th.
"The prime minister is in a stable condition. But he will have to cancel his Friday visit to Ireland," said Mr Marcin Kaszuba. "Thanks be to God, the prime minister left the helicopter on his own two feet."
A doctor who had examined Miller late on Thursday told reporters that two of Miller's vertebrae had been fractured but there was no dislocation and no danger of long hospitalisation.
Mr Miller was returning in foggy weather from a visit to southwestern Poland when an apparent engine failure forced the 26-year-old Soviet-era Mi-8 helicopter to land 20 kilometre south of Warsaw.
Police described the incident as an "emergency landing", but some witnesses interviewed by news agency PAP and other local news media said it looked more like a crash.
The government's press office said the helicopter, the same type as was used by Pope John Paul during his trips to Poland, had undergone a technical overhaul last year.
A senior government official said the accident showed that the government's ageing fleet of Soviet-designed aircraft needed urgent modernisation.