Mexico sentences 5 men to 697 years each for killing 11 women

Five men in northern Mexico each were sentenced to 697 years in prison for the gender-driven killing of 11 women.

An official at the attorney general's office in the state of Chihuahua said Tuesday that this sentence was the longest ever given for femicide, a term of sexual hate crime usually defined as the killing of women due to their gender.

"They deceived young women to recruit them for prostitution and use them as drug distributors. When they were not 'useful' anymore, they took their lives and threw their bodies in the Navajo stream of the Juarez Valley," the prosecutor said in a statement.

In addition, the five suspects were ordered to pay a total of 550,000 U.S. dollars to the families of the victims, whose bodies were found as skeletal remains in the east of Ciudad Juarez in 2012.

In March, the Mexican Supreme Court for the first time ruled the killing of 11 young women in 2010 as femicide after initially being labeled as suicide.

In Ciudad Juarez, which borders the United States, hundreds of young women were murdered in the 1990s and early 2000s. Many of those crimes remain unsolved.

According to the National Citizen Femicide Observatory, a coalition of human rights groups, about 3,892 women were killed in Mexico between 2012 and 2013, but only 16 percent of the cases were investigated as femicides. Endi