TRENTON, N.J. (AP) - Two white state troopers were indicted on attempted murder charges yesterday for shooting three black and Hispanic men on the New Jersey Turnpike - one of a series of cases that have stirred a nationwide debate over racial profiling by police.

John Hogan, 29, and James Kenna, 28, could get up to 40 years in prison if convicted on the state charges.

The troopers are accused of firing 11 shots into a van containing four young men on their way to a basketball tryout in North Carolina in 1998. Two black men and a Hispanic man were wounded, and they have filed civil rights and injury lawsuits against the troopers and the state.

Hogan and Kenna have said that they stopped the van because the driver was speeding, and that they opened fire because the van was backing up to hit them.

Hogan's lawyer, Robert L. Galantucci, said Hogan was struck by the van on a dark stretch of highway and only had seconds to respond. He called the indictment ''politically motivated.''

A message left for Kenna's lawyer was not returned.

The shooting triggered protests and internal investigations that embroiled the New Jersey State Police in the controversy over racial profiling, or the practice of stopping motorists on the basis of race.

Earlier this year, Gov. Christie Whitman fired the State Police superintendent after he said minorities were responsible for most of the state's cocaine and marijuana traffic.

In June, President Clinton issued an executive order calling on federal law enforcement agencies to collect race and gender data in all stops and arrests. Police in several places, including North Carolina, Houston, San Diego and San Jose, Calif., have taken similar measures.

In April, Hogan and Kenna were indicted on charges of falsifying traffic-stop reports to conceal the fact they were stopping a lot of black drivers.

The following day, the attorney general's office issued a report confirming that traffic stop-and-search patterns provided evidence of racially discriminatory practices by the State Police.

Lawyers for Hogan and Kenna claimed then that the charges were paperwork mistakes and that the troopers were being used as scapegoats in the debate over racial profiling.