The Swedish Migration Agency came under heavy criticism from campaigners last year for its decision to withdraw the pair's tourist visa, which had been issued by the Netherlands.
But a new investigation by the Aftonbladet newspaper revealed on Tuesday that Pape Matar and Ibra Lo were sent home on a privately chartered plane accompanied by six border police officers, giving the deportation a sky-high price tag.
“When we see the cost, it just shows the absurdity and the system failure of what happened,” Malin Björk, the Left Party MEP who has highlighted the brothers' case, told The Local.
“You cannot give those two months back to those brothers and the discrimination they have received, I think it will mark them for the rest of their lives.”
She called again for a proper inquiry which could reveal what exactly had happened in the case .
“There needs to be an investigation, so we know what really happened, what went wrong, so we can make sure it doesn't happen again. It's so clearly a case of racial profiling, I don't think two white brothers would have been treated the same way.”
Ibra Lo told The Local that he was still waiting for some clarification from Swedish authorities about why he was locked up.
“I don't know why the police were racist to me. I've asked for a response from Sweden but still haven't heard anything,” he said.
He said that he was stopped at the Swedish border, after travelling on a Flixbus from The Netherlands to visit a festival in Malmö.
“They asked us questions about our visa and we told them that we got it in the Netherlands. They told us they were going to take us in for questioning and I asked why,” he said.
“I told them we weren't criminals and we didn't have drugs. They told me that I didn't have the right to speak and I asked why, but they didn't answer.”
The two were then held in prison for nine weeks.
“I couldn't eat because I was so worried – that's never happened to me before,” Lo said. “We have visited other countries in Europe before like Spain and Portugal and never had any problems.”
Sweden's border police claim that they had decided to ask for the visas to be withdrawn after finding reason to believe that they had been “obtained in a fraudulent manner”.
Sweden's interior Minister Mikael Damberg has not commented on the case.
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Maybe it’s so expensive because of champagne and drugs on the plane?!