It was utterly macabre. Even the best-managed disaster scene becomes an assault on the senses, but drop it into a hard-fought separatist war zone and it becomes heartless, even grotesque.

And so it was with Malaysia Airlines flight MH17. Here was a Boeing 777 aircraft, a few hours after departing Amsterdam on July 17, 2014, bound for Kuala Lumpur – its 283 passengers, 38 of them from Australia, finishing their meal, reading a book, watching a movie or dozing, and its 15 crew drawing breath, while flying over territory that most were probably unaware was being torn apart by civil war.

Inexplicably and at 33,000 feet, the aircraft was disintegrating around them. We don't know if they had time to be aware that a missile had struck – but one of the victim's bodies was recovered with an oxygen mask around his neck.

Suddenly, villages and the sunflower crops in the Grabovo district of Donetsk province, near Ukraine's border with Russia, were being inundated with broken bodies, crumpled baggage and jagged aircraft debris.    Engines, wheels and wings exploded in an inferno fuelled by aviation gas, so hot that sections of the aircraft were reduced to rivulets of molten metal.

Strewn among nodding sunflowers, empty aircraft seats spoke of the unspeakable fate of those who had occupied them. A villager, who identified himself as a rebel sniper, gave me a tour of the wreckage – "bodies were falling like bullets," he said. He pointed to an upturned seat in which he said the body of one of the four pilots was still strapped when he first ran to the scene.

Other locals told reporters of naked human bodies falling into their fields and gardens and – in the case of one woman – through the roof of her home. Shamed, others told of looting – and of stolen items being returned to the site after the glare of international media reports.

The crash site was under rebel control and the emergency response was chaotic, with much of the body recovery work carried out by workers from nearby mines. Three days after the crash, body bags still lay head-to-toe along the road. In the humid heat of summer, the smell of death was appalling.

Secretly, the rebels had been trucking the bodies to Torrez, a nearby railway siding, where they stored them in four decrepit refrigerated rail wagons. I was there when they were opened for inspection by conflict monitors from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe – the stench pouring from the dark interior of the wagons was nauseating.

It was dubbed "the train of death". And when it finally was moved beyond the conflict zone, to Kharkiv, a government-controlled city in Ukraine's north-east, Dutch officials alarmed grieving families and friends around the world in announcing that as many as 100 bodies were missing.

In what Canberra dubbed "Operation Bring Them Home", Australian, Dutch and Malaysian investigators made several forays to the crash site, but gave up after 10 frustrating days. One of the Australian contingent said of their bomb-dodging efforts: "The risks are getting higher and the rewards are getting lower."

The Dutch were never quite clear about the discrepancy in the  body count, but there was a hint that perhaps the searchers didn't need to be in harm's way in the first place, when Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte told a press conference that information  received from a Ukrainian military doctor who had supervised the early recovery "had changed the recovery team's perception of the earlier effort undertaken by local authorities ... fortunately more was done after the disaster than we [had] thought until now."

And if the investigators seemed to have been unnecessarily in harm's way, it seemed that so too had Flight MH17.

Pun not intended, this was Russian roulette. The downed aircraft could just as easily have been a service operated by Singapore Airlines or another by Air India that were  flying through the area at the same time. But it was unlikely to be aircraft owned by Korean Air, Asiana Airlines or British Airways among others, because as early as March 2014 they had opted to avoid this Ukrainian air corridor.

In April 2014, the International Civil Aviation Organisation had warned governments of a risk to commercial air traffic in the area. But, according to reports, as many as 900 international flights had gone through in the week before MH17 was shot down,flown by 37 airlines. Those that dominated were Aeroflot, Singapore Airlines, Ukraine International Airlines, Lufthansa and Malaysia Airlines.

The Russian-backed rebels had proved adept at shooting down Ukrainian military aircraft – and in June 2014, Russian news outlets reported the rebels had commandeered a BUK missile system when they had overrun a Ukrainian air defence base. The breakaway Donetsk People's Republic also tweeted acquisition of the missile system and when, three days before MH17 was downed, a Ukrainian Air Force An-26 transport aircraft, flying at 21,000 feet was shot down, there were reports that a BUK missile had been used.

Associated Press reported that one of its reporters had seen a BUK M-1 launcher in the village of Snizhne, 16 kilometres south-east of the crash site on July 17 – escorted by two civilian vehicles and "operated by a man with unfamiliar fatigues and a distinctive Russian accent".  The BBC also quoted witnesses on the presence of a crew that was thought to be Russian.

The weight of the evidence, official and anecdotal, was that a BUK system had destroyed MH17. Highly contentious were questions of where it had come from, who had operated it and what had happened to it after the attack.

In the immediate aftermath of the crash – the deadliest air craft shoot-down in history –  a Russian who led the separatist fighters reportedly claimed on social media that his men had taken down a Ukrainian military transport – the post was deleted and denials of any role by the insurgency were issued when it was confirmed the plane was a commercial passenger service.

There were multiple eyewitness accounts of a BUK system moving in the area and of separatist admissions that the missile had been theirs.

Then came the global finger pointing as claim and counter-claims were issued, with many Western intelligence agencies backing Ukrainian claims that Russia was complicit in the strike on MH17 – and Moscow blaming Ukrainian forces for the attack.

In October 2014, Germany's Federal Intelligence Service briefed German politicians on its conclusion that separatist fighters had fired the missile from a captured Ukrainian BUK system.

Moscow's initial argument that MH17 had been take down by an air-to-air missile launched from a Ukrainian aircraft was embarrassingly undercut when the Russian manufacturers of the BUK system reported their finding that indeed a BUK ground-to-air missile had hit MH17 – but that it was an old missile that predated the company's right to manufacture the systems.

The Netherlands is leading international teams investigating two aspects of the crash – the cause of the crash, which is expected to report in October; and the other a criminal investigation that it likely to stretch into 2016.

The countries participating in the investigations – The Netherlands, Australia, Belgium, Malaysia and Ukraine – are petitioning the United Nations Security Council to set up an international tribunal to deal with whoever is accused of perpetrating the attack – and Russia, a UN veto-power, is blocking it.

But the history of investigations into mass murder in the skies and of such UN tribunals is not encouraging.

Remember the Lockerbie case? Pan AM Flight 103 was bombed over Scotland in 1988, killing 259 people, but 11 years passed before Libya handed over the suspected bombers and it was 2003 before then Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi accepted responsibility and agreed to compensate the families of the victims.

And after six years and about $US500 million, the UN tribunal set up to investigate the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri is yet to arrest anyone, The Washington Post reported in April. The tribunal is trying five accused members of the Iran-backed Hezbollah movement for the bombing – but in absentia.

If the Dutch-led team investigating the MH17 crash wants a heads-up on the operations of the Hariri tribunal, it won't have to travel far – after the assassination of police investigating the Hariri death, the tribunal shifted its headquarters to The Netherlands.