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Google Maps has guided Spanish investigators to solve a year-long murder mystery by capturing the moment a person stashed a suspected body in a car.
Police in the northern region of Castile and Leon began their investigation in November 2023 when someone reported the disappearance of a male relative.
Officers arrested a woman who was the missing man’s partner and another man who was his ex-partner in Soria province on November 12. said the police in a statement this Wednesday.
Investigators then raided the suspects’ homes and searched their vehicles, but also stumbled on an unexpected lead in their search for more clues.
These are “images in a tracking application” where “he detected a vehicle that may have been used during the crime,” the statement said.
Spanish media circulated images of a Google Maps Street View screenshot from October 2024 that showed a person throwing an object covered in a white shroud into the trunk of a car in the town of Tajueco. It was the first time in 15 years that the car went to the town of Tajueco, the BBC informed.
The images helped solve the case, although they were not “conclusive,” police said.
Officials said another sequence of photos shows the blurred silhouette of someone carrying a large white package in a wheelbarrow, the the BBC reported.
The representative of the central government in Soria, Miguel Latorre, told the public channel RTVE that the person “allegedly can be” considered the culprit.
Police said a badly decomposed human torso believed to belong to the victim had been found this month in a cemetery in Soria province. The newspaper El País reported that he was a 33-year-old Cuban.
A judge has ordered the jailing of the suspects and the investigation remains open.
Google’s technology has helped investigators make breakthroughs in previous cases. In 2022, an Italian mafia boss who had been on the run for decades was arrested after being detected on Google Maps.
In 2019, the remains of a man missing for 22 years were finally found thanks to someone who brought up his old Florida neighborhood with Google satellite images and I noticed a car submerged in a lake.
