VANCOUVER — A Crown lawyer says holdups to the trial of a man found guilty of murdering a 13-year-old Burnaby, B.C., girl were mostly attributable to the defence and “discrete exceptional events,” as he argued against the case being thrown out over delays.

Daniel Porte told a B.C. Supreme Court judge that if those events were subtracted, the remaining delays to Ibrahim Ali’s trial would have amounted to about 25 months, falling within the allowable threshold.