Spanish police today announced the arrest of a man and a woman in connection with the disappearance of a 30-year-old man in an investigation based largely on a Google Street View photo showing the suspect carrying a large white bag in the trunk of his vehicle.

The events unfolded in November 2023. A missing person complaint was filed at the time by a relative of the victim, a resident of the province of Soria, in the region of Castile and León, in northwestern Spain.

“Among the evidence available to investigators to solve this crime were some photos they collected during their investigations on a geolocation application,” specifically a photo “of a vehicle that may have been used during the crime,” police said. in her announcement.

Police also relied on the context of their investigation and other evidence, but focused on this photo, which they have not said how their investigators discovered it.

In this photo from the digital navigation website Google Street View, which was visible this afternoon before it was blurred after processing and dated October, 10 months after the victim disappeared, a man wearing jeans and a blue jacket can be seen bending over while carrying a large white plastic bag, the shape of which leads one to think it contains a body, into the trunk of a vehicle.

“The person visible next to the car can obviously be the perpetrator of the disappearance (…). This is a question raised in the context of the investigation, which is ongoing,” Soria provincial official Miguel Latorre told state broadcaster RTVE today.

On November 12, police officers arrested the missing man’s partner and one of her ex-partners, the man in the Google Street View photos, in Soria. The two were remanded in custody.

Investigations carried out after the arrest of the suspects allowed authorities to find, in early December, “a human body in a state of advanced decomposition, buried in the cemetery of a municipality in Soria,” police said.

His identification is ongoing and could, according to police, “belong to the missing man”, who was a 33-year-old Cuban, according to El País newspaper.