There were those who thought it wrong to see very old men standing pathetically in the docks of German courtrooms on trial for crimes against humanity committed when they served as Nazi camp guards or officials during the Holocaust 60, even 70 years earlier.

The reality was that the justice that caught up with them was absolutely necessary. Though many of their murderous comrades may, one way or another, have escaped punishment, it was important that these men paid for their crimes and for all the barbarous crimes that disfigured an apparently civilized European state under Hitler’s demonic rule.

And so it will be with those responsible for blowing a civilian airliner out of the sky over Ukraine three years ago this week. At the memorial service near Schiphol airport, attended by 2,000 relatives of the 298 victims of Malaysia Airlines MH17, it was made clear that the perpetrators of this wicked crime would be brought to justice.

Dutch authorities say they have gathered the names of around 100 “persons of interest” who may, in some manner, have been involved in the firing of a Russian-made Buk ground-to-air missile from inside the rebel enclave in eastern Ukraine. Precisely who these individuals are is not being made public but it seems likely that they include Russian commanders as well as Ukrainian rebels who have been backed by Moscow. The Dutch believe that the Buk missile launcher was driven from Russian territory into the rebel enclave. They also believe that the missile was meant to hit a Ukrainian transport plane that was being used to gather intelligence.

It is unclear what went wrong, how the missile was fired at a civilian airliner instead. But it is claimed that intercepted communications among the rebels at first showed they were jubilant at hitting the Ukrainian military aircraft. But when it became apparent that a commercial airliner had been destroyed, there was consternation. The Buk battery with its remaining missiles was hastily withdrawn back into Russia. Then followed weeks of clearly deliberate obstruction by the rebels, stopping international investigators from reaching the crash site. It is assumed that this was a deliberate delaying tactic so that the wreckage could be cleared of any incriminating evidence.

In the event, the telltale puncture marks on the front of MH17’s fuselage were clear proof that it had been destroyed by just the sort of catastrophic airburst that the Buk missile was designed to deliver. That delay in allowing outside experts to examine the wreckage also produced an equally sickening crime, which was that looters ransacked the personal possessions of many of the dead passengers. There are unconfirmed reports that there were attempts to use stolen credits days after the disaster.

The men responsible for this heinous destruction of a civilian airliner with almost 300 people abroad, probably think that time will cover their tracks and that in the end investigators will be reassigned and the inquiry filed away and forgotten. But like Nazi killers, a few of them at least will discover just how wrong they are. At an airport immigration desk or in a Russia with a new government, they will be identified and arrested. Even 60 or 70 years from now, they will appear, old and pathetically frail in the dock, to answer for what they did.