Trial for accused in murder postponed again

*Editor’s Note: The victim’s name has been removed from the story due to a publication ban.

The trial for 31-year-old Ibrahim Ali, accused in a 2017 homicide has been pushed back again.

Ali’s trial was originally planned for September 2020, but jury selection was cancelled and the trial postponed until September 2021.

Then, to accommodate pre-trial applications, the trial was put over again and was due to start next week on Jan 10.

Communication counsel for the BC Prosecution Service, Dan McLaughlin, told the Beacon that the trial has been postponed again “due to the number of pre-trial applications,” and that jury selection will now begin on Sept 19 at BC Supreme Court in Vancouver. The trial is expected to run until the end of December.

McLaughlin wasn’t able to share the nature of those applications as the matter is before the courts. Ali is expected to appear in court for pre-trial matters on Jan 17.

The purpose of pre-trial applications is generally to clear up any legal or factual concerns beforehand, in order to speed up the length of the actual trial. According to a fact sheet from the Supreme Court of British Columbia, pre-trial conferences can involve conversations between the judge, defence, and Crown about: issues with evidence, pre-trial rulings the judge will be asked to make, schedules for pre-trial applications, the length of the trial, and the use of technology such as video conferencing.

Ali is accused of first-degree murder in the 2017 death of a 13-year-old, whose body was found in Burnaby’s Central Park early on the morning of July 19 that year.

The victim had been last seen on the afternoon of July 18, when she went for a walk around her Central Park area neighbourhood.

The case quickly shot to notoriety as one of the biggest investigations ever taken on by the Integrated Homicide Investigation Unit (IHIT). Billing the homicide as a “random attack,” investigators identified more than 2,000 persons of interest—narrowing that number down to 90 by August 2017.

They also scoured more than a thousand hours of surveillance footage and issued several pleas to the public for information before Ali was arrested on Sept 7, 2018. Police wouldn’t say at the time what evidence led them to Ali.

Several months after Ali’s arrest, the Burnaby Now reported that RCMP may have used a “DNA dragnet” of Middle Eastern men in the Lower Mainland in narrowing down their suspects.

The Now reported that “numerous Middle Eastern men living in the Lower Mainland – some of whom came to Canada to escape persecution in totalitarian regimes – were called up seemingly randomly and asked to provide voluntary DNA samples in relation to the killing.”

That report prompted criticisms from civil liberties groups over concerns of racial profiling, coercion, the targeting of vulnerable populations, and the storing of DNA samples.