What’s New
Google Street View has helped Spanish police arrest two people allegedly involved in the disappearance and death of a man in the province of Soria.
Why It Matters
A report was filed in November of 2023 for a man who disappeared in Spain. According to the police, a relative was suspicious of the messages he received from the missing person. Images from a “location search application” helped the investigators “solve the crime,” the Spanish National Police said in a statement.
“The investigators had images that they detected during the investigation in which, in a location application, they detected a vehicle that could have been used in the course of the crime,” the police statement reads.
The image from Google Maps’ Street View seems to show a man in a navy blue shirt and jeans hunched over the trunk of a maroon-colored car. The man, whose face is not seen, is seemingly pushing a white body bag into the car.
Officers arrested a woman who was the missing male’s partner as well as another man who was the woman’s ex-partner on November 12, according to the police statement.
Newsweek reached out to Google for a comment on their images assisting the investigation.
Google Street View
What To Know
After investigators arrested the two suspects, police raided their homes and inspected their vehicles. This is when they also stumbled upon the Google Maps’ imagery.
The image showed the first time in 15 years that a car was in the town of Tajueco in Soria, according to the BBC.
The Google Maps’ Street View image circulated Spanish media in October. While the images were not “decisive,” police said they helped “solve the crime.”
Part of the human remains of the missing man were found buried in a cemetery in a town in the province of Soria. The torso was described to be “in an advanced state of decomposition.” The man’s body was removed from the cemetery on December 11 and transferred to the Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences.
El PaÃs newspaper identified the victim as a 33-year-old Cuban national.
While Google’s Street View does not provide real-time images, its content has helped investigators before with cases. In 2022, an Italian mafia 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 was missing for 22 years were found after someone zoomed into his former Florida neighborhood with Google images. A car was found submerged in a lake.
Ten years earlier, in 2009, Dutch twin brothers who mugged a teenager in a Netherlands town were arrested after being caught on camera with Google’s mapping services.
What People Are Saying
Miguel Latorre, the central government’s representative in Soria, told broadcaster RTVE: the person in the Google Maps’ Street View image “can presumably be” the culprit.
What Happens Next
The investigation is still open for the “full clarification of the facts,” according to the police.