A Montreal couple and their son did not enter pleas as they made separate video appearances in a Kingston, Ont. court on first-degree murder charges.

Mohammed Shafi, his wife Touba Yahya Shafi and his son Hamed Shafi, 18, have also been charged with conspiracy to commit murders.

They were charged after the deaths of three of their daughters and a female relative, who were found dead in a submerged car.

The bodies of 19-year-old Zainab Shafi, along with her sisters, 17-year-old Sahar and 13-year-old Geeti, were found June 30 in a Nissan Sentra that was submerged in the Rideau Canal.

Rona Amir Mohammed, described by police as a 50-year-old relative, was also inside the same car.

The accused family members have hired new Kingston-area lawyers.

The new lawyers say they have received no discourse of evidence from the police and are expecting some information by Aug. 12.

The accused are due back in court on Aug. 14.

The court has authorized the couple's other children to make unsupervised visits at the detention centres they are being held in.

Following the discovery of the bodies at the end of June, Mohammed Shafi claimed his daughters and first wife -- the 50-year-old woman found in the car -- died after the family was making its way back to Montreal after a trip to Niagara Falls.

The family had stopped for the night at a Kingston hotel and Mohammed Shafi said that he woke up and found one of his cars missing. He claimed his eldest daughter, Zainab, was prone to taking the car out on the road without his permission.

But more than three weeks after the bodies of the four women were found in the car, police charged Mohammed Shafi, as well as his wife and son, with the killings.

Police allege that the three accused operated the car that was found in the canal with the four bodies inside.

Rob Tripp, an investigative reporter with the Kingston Whig-Standard, said that relatives of the accused contacted police to relay their suspicions that the four women had not died as a result of an accident.

"We've got four relatives, in this case, of one of the victims who all live in Europe," he told CTV's Canada AM during a phone interview from Kingston on Thursday morning.

"Within days of this event, of the four women being pulled out of the canal, these relatives were calling and e-mailing the police in Kingston, alleging that this could not be an accident. They believed it was an honour killing orchestrated by the patriarch, the father in this family, along with his wife and his oldest son, to restore his honour because of apparent offences to his honour by his daughter and his first wife."

Another relative, however, has denied that the four women died as a result of an honour killing.

In a recent interview with the Toronto Star, Zarmina Fazel has alleged that the victims died as part of a suicide bid by the eldest daughter, Zainab Shafi.

"Zainab was not normal," Fazel said. She defended both parents, saying that father Mohammed is "a very honest man" and that the teens' mother was "not that kind of person."

The Shafi family is originally from Afghanistan, but lived in Dubai for about 15 years before moving to Canada in recent years.

Mohammed Shafi had a successful business selling Japanese cars in Dubai, and last year purchased a shopping mall in Laval, Que., for more than $1 million.

With reports from CTV's Rosemary Thompson, CTV Montreal's Daniele Hamamdjian, and files from CTV's Canada AM and The Canadian Press