BANK ROBBERY SUSPECTS HELD AFTER SHOOTOUT WITH LAPD UNIT.

Byline: Associated Press 

A special police squad tracked a team of bank robbers Thursday, wounding two of the five men in a parking lot shootout after a holdup at a Wells Fargo Bank branch.

The other three, in their 20s and 30s, were arrested after the 10:30 a.m. gunbattle, Buena Park police Capt. Richard Ciampa said.

Members of the Los Angeles Police Department's controversial Special Investigations Section were involved in the shootout, said Los Angeles Police Department spokesman Mike Partain.

The gunmen robbed the bank on Knott Avenue in Buena Park, an Orange County city, then fled to a parking lot where they exchanged their Jeep Cherokee getaway car for a yellow van.

Bill Norris, a clerk at a nearby Ralphs supermarket, said he was on the loading dock when ``a plainclothes car came pulling up and blocked the driveway . . . about that time the shots started going off and the officers were yelling, and then there were more shots.''

Norris estimated he heard 12 to 15 shots.

The brown-striped yellow van, bullet-riddled with at least one window smashed, was left angled into a slot in a shopping center parking lot and blocked in by unmarked police vehicles.

Three men lay on the ground, handcuffed.

Later, they were taken away in ambulances.

Buena Park police Lt. Robert Chaney said the men were suspects in bank robberies in Los Angeles and Orange counties, and the LAPD Special Investigations Section had ``surveilled these people from their L.A. County area.''