An American college student killed Friday during anti-government violence in Egypt was in the country on an internship to teach English to young children while also improving his Arabic skills, family members said.

Andrew Pochter, 21, a student at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, was killed in Alexandria during clashes between supporters and opponents of President Mohammed Morsi, the college said. Security officials in Egypt said he was fatally stabbed near the headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood, which had been set on fire.

Pochter, who was to enter his junior year at Kenyon in the fall, worked as an intern at Amideast, a nonprofit organization.

Pochter’s family released a statement saying he had planned to return to theMiddle East for a semester abroad.

“Our beloved 21-year-old son and brother Andrew Driscoll Pochter went to Alexandria for the summer, to teach English to 7- and 8-year-old Egyptian children and to improve his Arabic,” the statement said. “He was looking forward to returning to Kenyon College for his junior year and to spending his spring semester in Jordan.

“He went to Egypt because he cared profoundly about the Middle East, and he planned to live and work there in the pursuit of peace and understanding,” the family said.

Pochter, who was from Chevy Chase, Md., had also spent time in Morocco. In an article he wrote for Al-Arabiya News in 2011, he explored the potential of the Arab Spring protests that forced out Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak that year, viewing them through the lens of his time living with a Moroccan family.

“By their participation in community protests, members of my host family and friends are trying to reinvent themselves as members of their society and changing how the rest of the world perceives them,” he wrote. “By voicing their opinions, they can help shape the true face of this Moroccan generation, not by what the media say.”

At Kenyon, Pochter was active in Hillel, the campus’ center for Jewish life, according to The Kenyon Collegian, the student newspaper. He went to high school at the Blue Ridge School, an all boys boarding school outside Charlottesville, Va., where he won the foreign language award his senior year and played lacrosse.

Egyptian security officials said Pochter was stabbed in the chest near his heart late Friday during clashes between pro- and anti-Morsi protesters in Alexandria. He was taken to a nearby military hospital where he was pronounced dead shortly after.

On Saturday, Egyptian prosecutors ordered the arrest of several suspects in the killing, but gave no information on the number of suspects or their identities.

The prosecutor also ordered that Pochter’s body be handed over to American officials.

U.S. Embassy officials did not release any details about the circumstances of Pochter’s death, but the family, in its statement, said, “As we understand it, he was witnessing the protest as a bystander and was stabbed by a protester.”

“Andrew was a wonderful young man looking for new experiences in the world and finding ways to share his talents while he learned,” the family said.

Information for this article was contributed by Ben Hubbard of The New York Times.

Front Section, Pages 6 on 06/30/2013