Google Maps has guided Spanish investigators to resolve a year-long homicide thriller by capturing the second an individual stowed a suspected corpse right into a automobile.
Police within the northern area of Castile and Leon started their probe in November 2023 when somebody reported the disappearance of a male family member.
Officers arrested a girl who was the lacking male’s associate and one other man who was her ex-partner in Soria province on November 12, police said in an announcement on Wednesday.
Investigators then raided the suspects’ houses and inspected their autos but additionally discovered an sudden lead within the seek for additional clues.
These had been “pictures in a location utility” the place they “detected a automobile which will have been used through the course of the crime,” the assertion mentioned.
Spanish media circulated photos of a screenshot of Google Maps’ Street View from October 2024 exhibiting an individual dumping an object coated in a white shroud right into a automobile trunk within the village of Tajueco. It was the primary time in 15 years that the automobile had been to the city of Tajueco, the BBC reported.
The pictures contributed to resolving the case, although they weren’t “decisive,” police mentioned.
Officials mentioned one other picture sequence reveals the blurred silhouette of somebody transporting a big white bundle in a wheelbarrow, the BBC reported.
The central authorities’s consultant in Soria, Miguel Latorre, advised public broadcaster RTVE the individual “can presumably be” thought of the perpetrator.
Police mentioned a severely decomposed human torso believed to belong to the sufferer had been discovered this month in a cemetery in Soria province. El Pais day by day reported that he was a 33-year-old Cuban.
A decide has ordered the suspects into custody and the investigation stays open.
Google expertise has helped investigators make breakthroughs in instances earlier than. In 2022, an Italian mafia boss who was on the run for many years was arrested after he was spotted on Google Maps.
In 2019, the stays of a person lacking for 22 years had been lastly discovered due to somebody who zoomed in on his former Florida neighborhood with Google satellite images and seen a automobile submerged in a lake.
