A prominent lawyer who received threats after handling high-profile cases is dead after being shot by two men riding on a motorcycle.

Interior Minister Mauricio Lopez Bonilla said lawyer Lea Marie de Leon was killed Thursday as she left her office, and he thinks a drug cartel was responsible.

But Hernandez said that a prosecutor's office employee could be behind the killing.

De Leon is married to Edin Hernandez, editor of the Prensa Libre newspaper.

The attorney represented Maria del Rosario Melgar, whom prosecutors had accused of involvement in the killing of former Interior Ministry adviser Victor Rivera.

She was also a defense lawyer for two men implicated in the 2009 killing of Rodrigo Rosenberg, a lawyer who accused the country's president in a video made before his death.