The image, from northern Spain, showed a man with a white bag in the trunk of a car. The National Police said it helped them solve a missing-person case.
It was a routine image picked up by Google Street View: a man loading a white bag into the trunk of a car.
But that unexceptional picture, the 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.
In a news release, the National Police said that 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 who they said was also the woman’s partner.
The two were detained last month at two locations in Soria, which is about 100 miles north of Madrid, police said. Investigators later located human remains that they believe could belong to the missing man. The police did not identify the people who had been detained or the victim.
The 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, the police said in their release.