Google Maps has helped Spanish investigators solve a years-long murder mystery by capturing the moment a person stuffed a suspected body into a car.
Police in the northern region of Castile and León began their investigation in November 2023 when someone reported the disappearance of a male relative.
Officers arrested a woman, the missing man’s partner, and another man who was her ex-partner on November 12 in Soria province. said the police in a statement on Wednesday.
The investigators then searched the suspects’ houses and inspected their vehicles, but also came across an unexpected lead while looking for further clues.
These were “images in a tracking application” in which “a vehicle was discovered that may have been used in the course of the crime,” the statement said.
Spanish media circulated images of a Google Maps Street View screenshot from October 2024 showing a person throwing an object covered with a white shroud into the trunk of a car in the village of Tajueco. It was the first time the car had been in the town of Tajueco in 15 years, according to the BBC reported.
The images helped solve the case, but were not “crucial,” according to the police.
Officials said another photo sequence showed the blurred silhouette of someone carrying a large white bundle in a wheelbarrow BBC reported.
The central government representative in Soria, Miguel Latorre, told public broadcaster RTVE that the person could “presumably” be considered the perpetrator.
Police said a badly decomposed human torso believed to belong to the victim was found in a cemetery in Soria province this month. The daily newspaper El País reported that he was a 33-year-old Cuban.
A judge has ordered the arrest of the suspects and the investigation is ongoing.
Google’s technology has helped investigators make breakthroughs in previous cases. In 2022, an Italian mafia boss who was on the run for decades was arrested after his death discovered on Google Maps.
In 2019, the remains of a man missing for 22 years were finally found, thanks to someone who zoomed with him to his former Florida neighborhood Google satellite images and noticed a car sunk in a lake.
