Gerry Adams has told the high court he was stunned by the 1996 Docklands bombing as he denied being at the nerve centre of the IRA’s operations.

The former Sinn Féin leader also denied having any prior knowledge of the bombing of the commercial district of east London, which shattered a 17-month old ceasefire.

Adams, 77, is accused in the civil trial of being a member of the IRA, having sat on its army council and being culpable for the Docklands bombing, the Manchester bombing in the same year and the 1973 bombing of the Old Bailey in central London.

On Adams’s second day on the witness stand, Max Hill KC, acting for men who were injured in the three bombings, suggested to the defendant that he had been behind the Docklands bombing as a way to bolster Sinn Féin’s political strategy.

“You shared the frustrations you described others holding and the need, in light of those frustrations, to perpetuate the armed struggle to bring the British government to the table,” he said.

Adams replied: “Those explosions brought an end to the IRA ceasefire and potentially the end to the peace strategy which I and others had worked on for 30 years.”

He said he had been stunned by what happened.

Hill asked him: “Did you know in advance about the February 96 explosion?”

Adams replied: “No, of course not.”

Quoting from an internal British government note from 1993, Hill said: “‘The home secretary has concluded that Adams is at the nerve centre of the PIRA [Provisional IRA]’. My question is, is that accurate?”

Adams said: “That is not true. The British government had to come to terms that there was a possibility of peace and a political process. They dodged their responsibility by demonising those of us who were trying to reach out and to find ways of getting out of the chaos towards a democratic conclusion.”

Asked by Hill why he did not admit his “history in the IRA”, Adams replied that he had repeatedly denied he had been in the paramilitary organisation and quoted Jonathan Swift, who wrote: “Falsehood flies, the truth comes limping after it.”

Separately, Adams said: “The bombings in this case, the killing of three people and the wounding of others, I regret very much, but the folks giving this information have a vested interest.”

He concluded his evidence on Wednesday and his counsel, Edward Craven KC, began closing submissions.

Craven told the judge, Mr Justice Swift: “You have actually had very little evidence of how, why and by whom these bombings were authorised.

“That is the central question in this trial. When you actually focus on that, the evidence is extremely limited and we say bordering on non-existent.

“There is not a single page in the 6,000-page bundle that implicates Mr Adams in any of the bombings.”

He described the evidence relating to intelligence given by witnesses for the three claimants, who are claiming symbolic “vindicatory” damages of £1 each, as “high-level assertions, unsupported by detail, uncorroborated by documents”.

The trial continues.