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Google Street View helped Spanish police arrest two people allegedly involved in the disappearance and death of a man in the province of Soria.

Why it matters

In November 2023, a man was reported missing in Spain. According to the police, the relative was suspicious of the messages he received from the missing person. Images from a “location tracking app” helped investigators “solve the crime,” Spain’s national police said in a statement.

“Investigators had access to images they captured during the investigation, which revealed a vehicle in the locator app that may have been used in the crime,” the police statement said.

A Street View image on Google Maps appears to show a man in a navy blue shirt and jeans hunched over the trunk of a maroon-colored car. The man, whose face cannot be seen, appears to be shoving a white body bag into the car.

Police arrested a woman who was the missing man’s partner and another man who was the woman’s ex-partner on Nov. 12, according to a police statement.

What to know

After investigators arrested the two suspects, police raided their homes and searched their vehicles. That’s when they also came across images from Google Maps.

For the first time in 15 years, the footage showed a car in the town of Tajueco, Soria, according to the BBC.

A Street View image from Google Maps made the rounds in Spanish media in October. Although the images were not “conclusive”, police said they helped “solve the crime”.

Part of the human remains of a missing man were found buried in a cemetery in a town in the province of Soria. The hull was described as “in an advanced state of decomposition”. The man’s body was taken from the cemetery on December 11 and transferred to the Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Medicine.

El País the newspaper identified the victim as a 33-year-old Cuban national.

Although Google’s Street View doesn’t provide real-time imagery, its content has helped investigators with cases in the past. In 2022, an Italian mob boss was arrested after being on the run for decades when he was spotted on Google Maps in Spain.

In 2019, the remains of a man who had been missing for 22 years were found after someone zoomed in on his former Florida neighborhood using Google images. The car was found submerged in the lake.

Ten years earlier, in 2009, Dutch twins who mugged a teenager in a Dutch city were arrested after being caught on camera by Google’s mapping services.

What people are saying

Miguel Latorre, representative of the central government in Soria, told RTVE television: the person in the Street View image on Google Maps “could probably be the culprit”.

What happens next

According to the police, the investigation is still open for “a complete clarification of the facts”.