Google Maps has guided Spanish investigators to solve a year-long murder mystery by capturing the moment a person stowed the suspect’s body in a car.

Police in the northern region of Castile and Leon began an investigation in November 2023 when someone reported a male relative missing.

On November 12, police officers arrested a woman who was the partner of the missing man and another man who was her ex-partner in the province of Soria. said the police in a statement on Wednesday.

Investigators then searched the suspects’ homes and examined their vehicles, but also hit an unexpected trail in their search for further clues.

These were “images in the location application” on which they “discovered a vehicle that could have been used during the crime,” the statement said.

Spanish media circulated Google Maps Street View screenshots from October 2024 showing a person throwing an object covered in a white shroud into the trunk of a car in the village of Tajueco. It was the first time in 15 years that the car was in the city of Tajueco, BBC reported.

The images contributed to solving the case, although they were not “crucial”, police said.

Officials said the second sequence of photos shows a blurred silhouette of someone carrying a large white bundle in a cart, The BBC announced.

The representative of the central government in Soria, Miguel Latorre, told public broadcaster RTVE that the person “can probably” be considered guilty.

Police said a badly decomposed human torso believed to belong to the victim was found in a cemetery in Soria province this month. The newspaper El Pais reported that it was a 33-year-old Cuban.

The judge ordered custody of the suspects, and the investigation remains open.

Google’s technology has already helped investigators make breakthroughs in cases. In 2022, an Italian mob boss who had been on the run for decades was arrested after he spotted on Google Maps.

In 2019, the remains of a man missing for 22 years were finally found thanks to someone zooming in on his former Florida neighborhood with Google satellite images and noticed a car submerged in the lake.