A missing person’s case from October 2023 has likely been solved in the most bizarre way in Spain, thanks to a Google Street View car that allegedly caught a man moving the victim’s body, reports the UK daily The Times. As luck would have it, the Google Street View vehicle was reportedly in the town in question — Tajueco — for the first time in 15 years.
The Street View app allows users to navigate maps in three dimensions with real photos captured by cameras in cars driving the streets.
The Spanish police have described the Google Street View image, captured in October this year, as a clue, but not a decisive factor in cracking the case.
Parts of the victim’s body were reportedly recovered from a cemetery last week.
How Investigation Began
The Google Street View vehicle reportedly passed by just as the man bent down to put a large bundle, thought to be the body, in the boot of his car. Two persons, including the man in the photo, have been arrested for the murder.
The victim was a man aged 32. The accused include a Cuban woman, the former partner of the deceased and ex-wife of the man caught in the photo. The murder allegedly took place in the sparsely populated Spanish province of Soria in the northern Castile and León region.
“In Tajueco, a hamlet of 56 souls in northern Spain’s Soria province, nothing ever happens,” the Spanish newspaper El Pais said in its report on the case. “And if it did, surely nobody would find out, one of the residents must have thought two months ago, when he allegedly placed in his car trunk, in broad daylight, a bundle that police suspect could be the body of a man who went missing a year ago.”
The report notes that it isn’t clear what happened in the 12 months between the victim going missing and the recovery of his remains.
Police began an investigation in the case when a relative of the victim said messages sent from the latter’s phone sounded suspicious. The messages read that the victim had found a woman with whom he was moving far away, and that he was leaving his phone behind.
Police say they have so far only found the torso of the victim “in an advanced state of decomposition” in the Andaluz cemetery. Tajueco, where the accused man lives, is just over 10 km from Andaluz.
The 48-year-old suspect was seen in the Google Street View images wearing jeans, a blue jacket of Club Deportivo Numancia — a local football team — and brown boots. Police also looked into other Google Street View images that could potentially offer more clues. Those additional photo sequences reportedly show the blurred silhouette of someone dressed in dark blue ferrying a large white bundle in a wheelbarrow.
The image of the suspect purportedly placing the body in the car was still accessible on Google Street View as of Thursday, Australia’s ABC news portal reported.
The writer is an independent journalist.
