A former Florida missionary was sentenced to 58 years in prison on January 28, for recording himself while he sexually violated indigenous girls from the Amazon. Warren Kennell admitted to abusing the girls for many years after befriending them while he was setting up a church for the Katukina tribe in the Amazon. During his offence, Kennell was working for the New Tribes Mission based in Sanford.

Tanya Davis Wilson, assistant US attorney said that Kennell had abused his post as a missionary “in the most horrendous way.”

“We are heartsick. Children are to be protected, not hurt. We are grateful to the authorities for the prosecution of this individual despite international legal obstacles,” said a spokesperson for the ministry.

Homeland Security agents started investigating the 45-year-old missionary after they received cues that Kennell was uploading explicit photos on a child pornography website. Agents stopped Kennell after he returned to Orlando from Brazil in May 2013 so he could be searched. The investigators found many digital storage devices that contained sexually explicit images of children.

According to authorities, Kennell confessed that he was the man abusing the girls in the photographs and for those that he was not present in, he was the photographer. Investigators finally found 940 photographs of child pornography on the missionary’s desktop. He pleaded guilty to two charges of production of child pornography. He also apologized during the hearing of his sentence saying he had “hurt a lot of people.”

Kennell’s father requested the court for leniency, listing some of the positive contributions his son had made during his life. New Tribes Mission is one of the leading Christian missionary organizations in the world. This is not the first time the organization has faced such allegations. In 2011, it was sued by a woman who had allegedly been raped repeatedly while she lived in a dormitory for missionary children in the Philippines.