A woman rescued by Spanish police after she had bound her arms to the steering wheel of her car and almost asphyxiated herself said she had been trying to recreate a scene from the bestselling erotic novel and film series Fifty Shades of Grey.

Members of Spain’s National Police force were called to a car park at a popular beach in Tenerife after a passer-by heard the car’s horn sounding repeatedly as the woman bashed her head against the wheel.

When the witness approached the car by Las Teresitas beach on Monday morning, he saw the woman immobilised and bleeding from her arms in the driver’s seat of a Citroën 3, having lashed her wrists to the steering wheel with cable ties and coiled duct tape around her neck. Fearing that this was the scene of a kidnapping or another serious crime, he phoned the police.

The officers had to use a knife to cut the woman free from her state of what appears to have been self-inflicted torture inside her own Citroën 3 car.

“I wanted to recreate a scene from 50 Shades of Grey but it got out of hand. I don’t have a partner and I am alone,” the woman, whose identity has not been revealed, told her rescuers, according to island newspaper La Opinión de Tenerife.