Witness Marko Miljanic, commander of the Independent Skabrnja Battalion who left the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) in May 1991 to become a member of the Croatian police, described how he organised defence forces in the village.
"We had six machine-guns, two RPGs, around 50 rifles, 10 pistols and a few hunting rifles. After the civilians were evacuated, some 240 people, a priest, a teacher and I remained in the village," the witness said.
He described the situation before the JNA attack, the presence of a JNA brigade in neighbouring Serb villages, and sporadic shelling and cease-fires, the last having been signed in The Hague on 5 November 1991.
On 18 November 1991 the JNA attacked Skabrnja without any reason, during a cease-fire, with 1,000 soldiers and members of the Territorial Defence, 28 tanks, planes and helicopters.
A kilometre from the village, a helicopter-borne assault took place, with parachutists from the Serbian city of Nis taking positions around the village, the witness said.
He used a radio-station to listen to a conversation between the then commander of the JNA Knin Corps, Ratko Mladic, who, after the explosion of a JNA truck carrying ammunition, was ordering Colonel Cecovic to proceed with the attack on Skabrnja.
As they went through the 8.5 kilometre long village, the soldiers and TO members were taking civilians out of their basements and killing them, using other civilians as human shields. "I was told that they were taking all people out of the basements and killing them indiscriminately. JNA troops were going first, followed by the 'vultures' who were doing that," the witness said.
On the day of the attack and the following day, 42 villagers were killed and 80 percent of the 500 Croat houses were completely destroyed, the witness said.
Under the indictment, 26 other civilians, including a large number of women, were killed until February 1992.
Miljanic said that he lost a half of his family in the massacre and that his father was killed before his wife's eyes.
"Skabrnja was not attacked for military but for political reasons; Vukovar was destroyed on the same day. After the massacre in Skabrnja, a mass exodus took place in Zadar, 30,000 people left the city and the goal was achieved."
Witness Neven Segaric, 11 at the time, described how he hid in the basement of his uncle's house with members of his family, from where they were forced out by JNA soldiers who threatened to kill them by throwing in a hand grenade.
"Then came Serb volunteers, people from nearby villages, who threatened, shouted insults, and cursed us, demanding that we hand over our weapons," he said.
The witness said that he saw a man wearing the insignia of "Krajina Militia" kill two villagers. The witness was taken prisoner and taken to the police station in Benkovac.
When he returned to the village in 1995, all he saw were destroyed houses.
The 60-year-old Martic, who used to be the minister of the interior and president of the self-proclaimed Croatian Serb statelet of Srpska Krajina, is charged with 19 counts of crimes against humanity committed against Croatian civilians from 1991 to 1995, war crimes in Bosnia in 1994, and the shelling of Zagreb in 1995.