On a nearly deserted street in northern Spain, the images appeared to show a man hunched over the back of a red Rover car, gingerly loading a bulky white sack into the boot.
A passing Google Maps camera car happened to snap the suspicious moment as it unfolded in the hamlet of Tajueco in October. Two months later, police have cited the image – which continues to appear on Google Maps – and others snapped by the camera car as clues that helped lead to the arrests of two people after the disappearance of a man last year.
The case traces back to November 2023, when a Cuban national living in Spain was reported missing by a relative, according to newspaper El País. The man had been living in the northern Spanish municipality of Soria, where he had turned up hoping to track down a woman believed to be his partner.
A relative of the Cuban man told police he became suspicious after receiving a series of texts from the man’s phone, telling the relative he had met another woman, was leaving Spain and would be getting rid of the phone, police said in a statement. “This made the complainant suspect that the messages had not been sent by the missing person and led him to report it to police.”
The investigation soon homed in on the Cuban man’s former partner and another man to whom she was believed to be romantically linked. Last month, police arrested the couple, alleging their involvement in the death and disappearance of the Cuban national. Weeks later a torso believed to be that of the missing man was found in the cemetery of a nearby hamlet.
Police declined to provide more details, saying only that the investigation was continuing.
They were swift, however, to highlight the role that Google Maps had played in capturing the harrowing images seemingly connected to the murder. “One of the clues that investigators used to solve the crime, though not conclusive, were the images detected during an investigation of a mapping application,” police said, saying that these images had helped to “detect a vehicle that may have been used in the course of the crime”.
On Wednesday El País canvassed neighbours of Tajueco, which has a population of 56, where several people said they had seen the images captured by Google Maps, but had given them little importance.
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“We would have never imagined he was doing anything and we didn’t think anything of it,” said one resident, while another noted that “we didn’t think that in the photo of the boot there would be a body.”