Former IRA activists are to sue Boston College over its decision to hand tapes of their stories from the Troubles to the police.

Richard O'Rawe, the IRA spokesman for prisoners inside the Maze during the 1981 hunger strike, is among four ex-paramilitaries taking legal action against the American university.

They accuse Boston College of breaching its contract with them by not advising participants in the Belfast Project that their testimony might be released by a US court order.

Forty ex-IRA and loyalist paramilitary veterans took part in the historical archive. None of their testimony was supposed to be heard until after they had died.

However, the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) went to the US supreme court last year to seize a number of the tapes they believed contained evidence concerning one of the most notorious killings of the Northern Ireland Troubles – the kidnapping, killing and secret burial of Jean McConville.

The IRA murdered and then hid the remains of the mother of 10 in 1972. One of the Belfast Project tapes contained allegations from the late Belfast IRA commander and former hunger striker Brendan Hughes that it was Gerry Adams, the Sinn Féin president, who gave the order for McConville to be "disappeared" to avoid any negative fallout from publicly admitting republicans had killed her.

Adams was arrested a fortnight ago, provoking a short-lived but major crisis in the peace process. He has consistently denied any involvement in the McConville murder. He has also denied claims he was ever in the IRA.

In his legal action O'Rawe said he had suffered "serious intimidation and distress together with reputational damage as is evidenced by recent widespread graffiti appearing in west Belfast".

He claims there was misrepresentation and breach of confidentiality together with negligence based on the failure of Boston College to advise him that what he said could be subject to court orders as part of other litigations.

His legal team has pointed out that as Boston College has a subsidiary company based in Dublin, under European law the case can be taken in the high court in Belfast.

O'Rawe stressed that his testimony contained no references to the McConville murder.

He said: "Despite that, the police were still able to get my recordings. They should never have been allowed to do that. I blame Boston College for the mess and I want them held accountable for putting me in this position."

The former IRA prisoner is now an author. His book Blanketmen alleged that the organisation's leadership outside the prison, including senior Sinn Féin figures such as Adams, vetoed a deal with the Thatcher government that could have ended the hunger strike after four prisoners had died. O'Rawe, who played a central role inside the H-Blocks during the fast, claimed in the book that they had secured a deal from the British which met most demands for political status but that this was scuppered by the external republican leadership to continue to ride a wave of political sympathy and gain a Westminster seat for Owen Carron in Fermanagh and South Tyrone – a seat left vacant after the death of Bobby Sands.