Members of the IRA gave interviews to the BBC in the early 1980s because of “their complete and utter astonishment” at Gerry Adams’s “brazen, unequivocal and unambiguous denial of his role” in the organisation, a court has heard.

The charge was made by the 40-year veteran of reporting on Northern Ireland, British journalist John Ware, during the fifth day of evidence in a civil action against Adams.

The case against Adams is being taken by three victims of IRA bombings in England: John Clark, who was injured in the 1973 Old Bailey bombing; Jonathan Ganesh, who was hurt in the 1996 London docklands bombing; and Barry Laycock, who was left with life-changing injuries from the 1996 Manchester Arndale bombing.

They are seeking damages of £1 from Adams and claim he was a member of the Provisional IRA (PIRA), which he has always denied, and that he was a controlling force behind the bombings.

“To the best of my recollection, the driving force behind IRA members wanting to give these interviews was Adams’s constant denialism,” said Ware in his witness statement in the case.

“It clearly grated with many of them that when Adams said that he strongly supported the armed struggle, his denial of actual PIRA membership allowed him to avoid taking personal responsibility for their actions.”

They believed, he said, that “it was a slippery way” for Adams to avoid taking personal responsibility for IRA attacks that he had ordered during his time as a senior IRA commander, or later a member of its army council.

In their view, “Adams had seemingly elevated himself to a higher moral plane than the IRA, when it was they who were sacrificing life and limb – as they would see it – for a cause Adams was leading”, Ware’s statement read.

Facing questioning from Adams’s barrister, Edward Craven, Ware insisted that he believed then and now that information given to him about Adams’s role by a senior RUC special branch officer, Brian Fitzsimons, in 1983, was true.

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The BBC journalist rejected Craven’s charge that he had decided to give evidence in the civil claim by Clark, Ganesh and Laycock solely because he wanted to be central to events. “Absolutely not,” he said.

Instead, Ware said he was there because there was an obligation on journalists who believe “in an objective truth” that the history books would not record after this case that Adams was not, and had never been, a member of the IRA.

That, he said, is objectively untrue, and that truth is known by members of the IRA, by those who served in the RUC and the British Army and by scores of journalists who covered the Troubles in depth.

He insisted that senior Sinn Féin figure Danny Morrison accepted the premise that Adams was a member of the IRA when Ware and he spoke on the margins of the Sinn Féin ardfheis in Dublin in 1983 after Adams had become president of Sinn Féin: “I can remember where the conversation took place in the Mansion House [in Dublin],” Ware said.

He acknowledged he did not have evidence linking Adams directly with the Old Bailey bombing in 1973, the Canary Wharf bombing in 1996 and the Manchester Arndale attack a few months later.

During several meetings in 1983 with Fitzsimons, Ware said the head of RUC special branch in Belfast had told him that the IRA’s decision to bomb commercial targets – including the La Mon hotel in 1978 – had been Adams’s idea.

“The intelligence reports that Fitzsimons read to me detailed how the commercial bombings were Adams’s idea; he was the main proponent of destabilising the economy this way, because it aligned with the PIRA’s campaign of investment prevention.”

In a later meeting with Fitzsimons and detective chief superintendent Bill Wilson in October 1983, the two RUC officers said the murder of Louis Mountbatten in the sea off Mullaghmore, Co Sligo had been cleared by Adams.

“Intelligence showed that the 1979 killing of Lord Louis Mountbatten could not have been done without the knowledge and approval of Adams, [Ivor] Bell and [Martin] McGuinness,” his witness statement records.

Adams “rightly claims credit” for the role that he played in helping to bring about the IRA ceasefires, the Belfast Agreement and the peace process, but he has excised from his memory “that he also started all of it”, said Ware.

“I’m told that Adams relinquished his role on the army council in 2005 when there was a final agreement with the PIRA on disarmament. I’ve been told this by colleagues, former members of the PIRA, and police sources.

“In short, my understanding is that Adams was on the Army Council from the late 1970s until the PIRA wound up as a military body in 2005. The PIRA still exists today, structurally, but it is more notional than anything else.

“I don’t know if Adams has persuaded himself that he wasn’t in the PIRA by virtue of his strategic and leadership role, as opposed to being the person who pulled the trigger or planted the bombs, as it were.

“My only reason for referencing this is because Adams does keep insisting that he was never in the IRA, while the rest of us are metaphorically open-mouthed at his chutzpah, given the sheer weight of evidence from his colleagues, comrades and other sources, and what he has written as Brownie [a pseudonym used in articles],” Ware said.

Retired brigadier Ian Liles, who was posted to Northern Ireland over several years while in the British army, told the court Adams signed off on operations of the Provisional IRA in the mid to late 1990s, such as the 1996 Manchester truck bombs.

The former British intelligence officer alleged Adams “would have authorised all attacks on the mainland at that time, as they were cleared through the army council [of the PIRA], of which he was an active member”.

“There is simply no way that the bombings in 1996 could have happened without the oversight and approval of Adams,” Liles (72) told the court.

Cross-examined by Adams’s barrister, James Robottom, Liles denied he was “speculating” about Adams’s membership of the army council by 1996. He refuted Robottom’s suggestion he was not an independent witness or that he was “hostile” to Adams.

The case continues.