Kung Fu and Kill Bill star David Carradine, who was found dead in a Bangkok hotel room yesterday, might have died from a botched attempt at auto-erotic asphyxiation, Thai police said today.

“There was a rope tied around his neck and another rope tied to his genitals, and the two ropes were tied together and they hung in the closet,” Lieutenant General Worapong Siewpreecha told reporters.

“Under these circumstances we cannot be sure that he committed suicide."

Auto-erotic asphyxiation is a dangerous practice which was linked to the untimely death of Australian pop singer Michael Hutchence in 1997, who was also found dead in a luxury hotel room. Oxygen is cut off to the brain to stimulate sexual arousal, but it is thought to cause hundreds of deaths per year in the United States.

Carradine, who soared to fame as a young monk in the popular 1970s television series Kung Fu and who more recently starred in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill film series, was in Thailand to shoot a film titled Stretch, produced by a MK2, France’s largest independent film company.

General Worapong said the production crew had told police the 72-year-old actor “drank beer from morning until evening the day before he was found dead”.

An autopsy report was expected within the next day. Carradine’s hotel room had been dusted for fingerprints and police were testing a drink found in the room.

Police have also asked the United States embassy for permission to question his wife, General Worapong said. No bruises were found on Carradine’s body, and security camera footage showed no-one entering or leaving Carradine’s hotel room, which had been locked from the inside.

The general manager of the Nai Lert Park hotel in downtown Bangkok, Aurelio Giraudo, told the Times that Carradine had checked in alone on Monday.

A spokesman for the US embassy in Bangkok said the investigation into Carradine’s death was a matter for Thai police and refused to speculate on the cause.

“We are taking the situation very seriously as we do with any American who dies overseas,” he said last night. “We send our condolences to his family.”

From a respected Hollywood acting family, led by his father the character actor John Carradine, David Carradine had staged a comeback when he starred in Tarantino’s Kill Bill films. His latest completed film, Portland, is due to be released next year.

Although he appeared in more than 200 films and television dramas, his career had slowed after he abandoned his role in Kung Fu as the serene Kwai Chang Caine, a Shaolin monk travelling through the American west in the 1800s. He reprised the role in a mid-1980s TV movie and played Caine’s grandson in the 1990s syndicated series Kung Fu: The Legend Continues.

In Tarantino’s two Kill Bill films he was a ganglord who ruled over a pack of assassins, and his acting in the second of the films won him a Golden Globe nomination as best supporting actor.

“All I’ve ever needed since I more or less retired from studio films a couple of decades ago ... is just to be in one,” Carradine said in an interview in 2004.

“There isn’t anything that Anthony Hopkins or Clint Eastwood or Sean Connery or any of those old guys are doing that I couldn’t do,” he said. “All that was ever required was somebody with Quentin’s courage to take and put me in the spotlight.”

He wrote a memoir called Spirit of Shaolin and continued to make instructional videos on tai chi and other martial arts.

In the 2004 interview, Carradine was frank about his past difficulties with alcohol and narcotics, but said he had conquered his addictions, and now only indulged in coffee and cigarettes.

“I didn’t like the way I looked, for one thing. You’re kind of out of control emotionally when you drink that much. I was quicker to anger.”

“You’re probably witnessing the last time I will ever answer those questions,” Carradine said. “Because this is a regeneration. It is a renaissance. It is the start of a new career for me.”

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