Several witnesses last week uploaded video clips to YouTube showing a security guard straddling the nine-year-old boy inside the Malmoe central station.
Crying and gasping for air, the boy can be heard reciting an Islamic prayer that is sometimes said when a person is about to die.
"The clip does not do reality justice," a witness who declined to be named wrote in regional daily Sydsvenskan.
The security guard has been suspended pending a police investigation into the incident, which took place after the boy boarded a train without a ticket.
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The footage has shocked Sweden, the first country in the world to ban corporal punishment for children, and a nation that prides itself on having some of Europe's most generous asylum policies.
After the incident the boy was returned to a care home where he had been placed after arriving in Sweden, but within a few hours ran away with a 12-year-old boy, described in the media as being his half brother, from a car taking them to local Migration Board offices.
"The nine-year-old boy has been found in the Jutland region of Denmark," Malmoe police spokesman Mats Karlsson told AFP.
Police have been criticised for making flippant remarks about the boys in the media -- including one-liners like "He took off like a pay cheque" -- and for only stepping up the search for them after public outrage began to build.
"Would a blond head have been banged against the floor?" columnist Lars Lindstroem wrote in tabloid Expressen, while author Jonas Gardell wrote an emotional text contrasting the boy's fate to that of his nine-year-old daughter.
However, south Sweden is also where the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats traditionally draw most of their support and surveys consistently show that young people in the region have a more negative view of immigrants than in the rest of the country.
When the immigrant-heavy neighbourhood of Rosengaard -- once home to Paris Saint-Germain striker Zlatan Ibrahimovic -- was hit by rioting in 2008, a policeman was filmed using racial slurs and likening one of the rioters to a monkey.