The painful saga of the Benhmuda family has taken a turn for the worse.

In 2008, the Mississauga family of six lost a bid for refugee status and was deported to Libya. Upon arrival at the airport, Adel Benhmuda, the father in the family, was imprisoned and tortured.

They eventually fled to Malta and lived in a shipping container in a refugee camp. In January this year — after a Federal Court slammed Canadian immigration officials for treating the Benhmuda case unfairly — the federal government agreed to let them back into Canada on humanitarian grounds.

On Wednesday, however, Canadian officials suddenly set a condition for their return — the Benhmudas must pay $6,000 for the price it cost the government to deport them to Libya in 2008.

The family’s lawyer, Andrew Brouwer, is outraged.

“This is so utterly disgusting,” Brouwer told the Toronto Star. “It’s like executing someone and then going to the family and demanding that they pay for the bullet.”

In a phone interview from Malta Thursday, Adel Benhmuda, whose family now lives in an apartment, said he doesn’t have anywhere near $6,000 saved up.

“You deport us to torture and now you ask me for the money back?” said Benhmuda, who is unemployed. “It’s unfair. They made the mistake in the first place.”

Benhmuda, his wife and their two sons fled to Canada from Libya in 2000. Libyan police had been harassing and beating Benhmuda, trying to learn the whereabouts of his brother, who was part of a group fighting Moammar Gadhafi’s dictatorship. In Mississauga, Benhmuda juggled two jobs and his wife, Aisha, gave birth to two more sons before their refugee claim was rejected in 2008.

An email from Canadian visa officials in the Paris office says that the Benhmuda’s won’t be charged for the deportation of the two sons born in Canada.

The email notes that “the applicant, his spouse and two non-Canadian children were removed from Canada at the cost of the Canadian government in August 2008. As such, the removal fees of $1500 per person must be repaid. Therefore, the total removal fees for the applicant, his spouse and his two non-Canadian children would be $6000.”

It adds that the Benhmuda’s must pay a further $800 — $400 per adult — for an “authorization to return to Canada.” The Benhmuda’s can apply for a federal loan to pay for the transportation cost of their return, the email says, but it can only be made available after the $6,800 fees are paid.

Brouwer acknowledges that federal officials have the right to demand the payments under federal regulations and laws. But he has asked Citizenship and Immigration Minister Chris Alexander to waive the fees on compassionate grounds.

In an email response to the Paris visa office, Brouwer wrote: “In an already infamous case that has exposed both the brutality of the deportation process and the unbridled bias of some visa officers, the latest email brings the matter to a brand new low.

“The demand that my clients reimburse the government of Canada for the cost of their deportation to torture in Libya is shocking and utterly outrageous.”

The case came to national prominence when the Star wrote of the family’s ordeal in June 2011.

The Benhmuda’s were deported to Libya when it was still in Gadhafi’s grip. Benhmuda, 44, was imprisoned on two separate occasions, for a total of six months.

He says prison guards repeatedly bound his bare feet, strung him up in the air and beat his soles with batons and electrical wires.

After fleeing Libya, the family was granted refugee status on the Mediterranean island of Malta. In February 2011, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees formally asked Canada to resettle them as refugees, noting that their prospects of a racism-free future on the island were dim.

In November 2011, Canadian visa officials in the Rome bureau rejected the family’s request to return on humanitarian and compassionate grounds. Brouwer appealed the decision to Federal Court.

In October 2012, Justice Mary Gleason ruled that “the entire Rome visa post had reached the conclusion that the applications were to be dismissed, before they had even been submitted.”

She described a disturbing level of bias against the Benhmudas, including the claim the family would need social assistance if allowed into Canada. In fact, the family’s application to return included a letter from Benhmuda’s former employer at an optical lab promising him a job.

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Officials also failed to consider, Gleason noted, “the incarceration and torture of Mr. Benhmuda” after Canada deported him to Libya.

In January, when the federal government agreed to the family’s return, the Benhmuda children — aged 9 to 17 — gathered the loonies and toonies they had kept as souvenirs and spoke with excitement about buying Timbits once they returned.

The federal government now wants 6,800 loonies before that can happen.

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