It was a routine image picked up by Google Street View: a man loading a white bag into the boot of a car.
But that unexceptional picture, authorities in Spain said on Wednesday, was among the clues that helped lead them to two people whom they recently arrested in the case of a man who disappeared last year.
National Police said officers had detained a woman described as the partner of the man who disappeared in the province of Soria, in the country’s north, along with a man they said was also the woman’s partner.
The two were detained last month at two locations in Soria, which is about 160km (100 miles) north of Madrid, police said. Investigators later found human remains that they said they believe could belong to the missing man. The police did not identify the people who had been detained or the victim.
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Police described the pair as “alleged perpetrators of a crime of aggravated illegal detention” and said they would face charges in the victim’s disappearance and in his death.
“Among the clues that the investigators had to solve the crime, though they were not necessarily the decisive ones, were some images that they detected during the investigations” on Google Maps, police said in their release.
The man had been reported missing in November 2023 by a relative who told police that they had been in regular contact by phone, authorities said.
After a period of silence, the relative began receiving suspicious messages from the man’s phone number, the police said. The messages claimed that he had met a woman and moved away from Soria, they added.
“All of this made the person who reported the crime become suspicious that the messages had not been sent by the missing man, and as a result, they decided to make it known to the National Police,” authorities said.
The missing man was originally from Cuba and had gone to the small town of Tajueco, in the province of Soria, to visit a romantic partner, according to the newspaper El País, which described the relative who went to the police as the victim’s cousin. El País said the victim was a man (33) whom it identified only by his initials, JLPO.
Investigators zeroed in on the two people who were ultimately arrested, and they obtained authorisation to search their homes and inspect their cars, police said.
Police did not specify when exactly investigators had obtained the image captured by Google, which shows a man in jeans standing behind a red car, with his hands on a bulky white package that looks roughly the size of a human body, or whether they had found it using the publicly available search tool on Google Maps, known as Street View.
On Wednesday, a spokesperson for the National Police limited her comments to confirming the source of the image. “It’s true,” she said, adding: “The image was not the key to solving the case.”
Google did not immediately respond to a request for information.
After the two had been detained, investigators focused on finding the missing man, the police said, which resulted in the discovery of a human torso that had been buried at a cemetery in Soria. Police said the remains, which were recovered on December 11th, had been turned over to a forensic team.
It is not the first time Google Maps has played a role in helping criminal investigators crack a case. In 2022, Italian authorities used Google Maps and Street View to help them track down a Sicilian man who had been convicted of murder and was on Italy’s list of most dangerous fugitives. He, too, was found in Spain.
While Google Maps has played a role in helping law enforcement officials solve crimes, the company’s camera-equipped Street View cars have also raised privacy concerns and angered some people.
In 2016, a man in Oakland, California, was charged with attacking several Google Street View vehicles because he believed they were surveilling him. In one case, a criminal complaint said, he threw beer bottles at a vehicle, causing the area under the vehicle to burst into flames.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.