Mexican state hands down historic sentence for femicide

Police officers stand guard as the six men accused of the kidnapping and killing of 11 women listen to the verdict at a court room in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico July 27, 2015. REUTERS/Jose Luis Gonzalez

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Five men in northern Mexico were sentenced to an unprecedented 697 years in prison for the gender-driven killing of 11 women, in a state where hundreds of young women have been murdered since 1990.

The sentence was the longest-ever given for a femicide, the killing of a woman due to her gender and was based on scientific evidence, said an official at the attorney general's office in the state of Chihuahua, home of the border city of Ciudad Juarez, which in 2008 recorded one woman missing each day.