Actually, the newspaper is city-owned and has some kind of official status (for instance, it is responsible for publishing municipal laws and suchlike). The unnamed officials you have referenced might as well sue themselves.

We are getting contradictory rumours down here. Some say the city had the edition closed, some say they had not. There's a conflict-of-interests background to the whole story, with the municipal legislative and executive struggling for control over the newspaper. I somewhat suspect that the very issue of the cartoon had been used by one of the contending sides as a pretext for the current legal and PR activity, in a move against their adversaries. Aye, we wonders.