Trial for man accused of murder pushed to January 2023

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

The trial for Ibrahim Ali, who is charged with first-degree murder in the 2017 death of a 13-year-old has been postponed again.

The BC Prosecution Service says the trial will now begin on Jan. 16, 2023.

This is the fourth time Ali’s trial has been delayed. It was originally planned for September 2020, but jury selection was cancelled at that time and the trial postponed to September 2021—then, to accommodate pre-trial applications, it was set over again until January 2022, and then later pushed to September 2022.

In an emailed statement, prosecution service spokesperson Dan McLaughlin said that the further delay to January 2023 is necessary to accommodate “various pre-trial applications”, which cannot be reported on due to publication bans by the court.

McLaughlin said that while court proceedings are expected to last three to four months, the outcome of those pre-trial applications will impact the length of the trial.

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.

The victim was found dead in Burnaby’s Central Park in the early hours of July 19, 2017, after her parents reported her missing the previous evening.

Her death, billed as a “random attack”, became one of the highest-profile cases ever investigated by the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team. Investigators identified more than 2,000 persons of interest before narrowing the number down to 90 by August 2017, and searched through more than a thousand hours of surveillance footage for clues.

Ali was first arrested and charged with murder in September 2018, more than a year after her death. Police declined to say what evidence led them to Ali.

The case came under further controversy after the Burnaby Now reported the RCMP may have used a “DNA dragnet“, asking Middle Eastern men from across the Lower Mainland to provide DNA samples to rule them out as 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 regime—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.