Mexican Women's Activist Shot in Juárez

(Steve Hise)

A Mexican state prosecutor who crusaded against violence toward women was shot Friday in the border city of  Ciudad Juárez in an attack authorities say was an attempted robbery.

Chihuahua state prosecutors said Norma Andrade, 51, was shot twice outside her home, but is in stable condition in a local hospital.

Andrade was the second activist to be shot this week in northern Mexico. Anti-crime activist Nepomuceno Moreno was killed Monday in Hermosillo. He had protested the kidnapping of his teenage son.

Andrade founded an organization of relatives of women who have gone missing or been murdered in Ciudad Juárez to pressure authorities to solve the cases. Her daughter Lilia Alejandra García Andrade was tortured, raped and killed in 2001 when she was 17.

Arturo Sandoval, spokesman for the state Attorney General's Office, said Andrade told investigators that a man approached her outside her house and tugged at her purse. When she tried to hold on to it, the man fired his gun wounding her right hand and left shoulder, Sandoval said.

Authorities were still trying to determine whether it was a robbery or a murder attempt, Sandoval said.

Andrade's daughter, Malu Andrade, told The Associated Press that teachers at the middle school where her mother works said suspicious men had been asking about her whereabouts Friday morning. The attack happened in the afternoon.

"Authorities knew that we had been threatened," the daughter said by telephone.

A series of eerily similar killings of more than 100 mainly young women began in Ciudad Juárez in 1993, but appeared to had tapered off by late 2004 or early 2005.

The killings have been the topic of books, documentaries and the 2006 movie "Bordertown" starring Jennifer Lopez. Lopez in 2007 received a special recognition from Andrade and her organization, Bring Our Daughters Home.

Based on reporting by the Associated Press. 

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